I do not own the movie Titanic.

A longish drabble that made a home inside my brain directly after watching this movie. Kind of grim, and not very uplifting at all, if the title is any indication. Forgive my errors and inconstancies.

 DEATH IS FICKLE

She'd turned onto her back, and he found himself staring into space. He knew he was going to die, as surely as he knew anything, and that Rose would live out the remainder of her life—if she had much of one, something which was becoming more unlikely by the second—without him.

Even so, even with his darling, beloved Rose wasting away in the cold, he did not think of her. He did not think of the cries, which were getting fainter and fainter as death stalked closer and closer.

He thought of home. Though he publicly declared himself a gypsy-like wanderer, yes, he, too, had once had a family. A caring, loving one at that, for the most part. Jack realized then with a sharp twinge that he had not seen them in years and would more likely than not, never seen them again.

Mother. He wondered how she faired, if she was still bearing children for that alcoholic Jack called father, though in the past decade, not very willingly. Then Cindy came to mind, as she always did when he thought of dear ol' Chesapeake Falls.

She had always been physically weak, from her very birth, but that had never stopped her mind. Bright, she was. She could have been anything, done anything, if she put her mind to it.

But her body couldn't hold a soul like hers, it seemed, and his older sister expired at the ripe age of fifteen. She had been his first inspiration, and he had always drawn her. Sick, well, sleeping, eating, reading, however she felt, he made her immortal in his art. To him, there was no female more beautiful, even Rose, no angel she could not outshine. Now, though, the only remainders of her living face were either in the hands of some obscure person or at the bottom of the sea with the fish and everyone who had died with Titantic.

He remembered her fine-looking hands.

Soon after her death, he had begun his wanderings. He couldn't put up with it all with Cindy gone from this earth. So he didn't. Packing his charcoal, his paper, his few clothes and a necklace with this odd symbol hanging from it. It had been Cindy's favorite. She said the symbol meant life. Despite the fact this mere symbol had not saved her, Jack treasured it beyond nearly anything else. Through it, Cindy lived on symbolically if not in any other way, and became his guardian angel of sorts.

But by this time, she must have abandoned him, because here he was, drowning or freezing to death, but dying. And it hurt too much to think, the memories painful to his soul, but if he didn't think, the pain would seep through into his very core. He didn't want that, not yet. He wouldhave givenanything to be in Fance right then, cold, but not this cold, drawing those beautiful French whores.

Or drawing Cindy at her worst, at her last minute, because he was at his last minute and there wasn't any pain. He felt so numb it almost ached, but not quite.

It was eating at him. He wasdying, and all he could think of was how oranges tasted, because he loved oranges. Sweet and tangy, the seed only a small nuisance compared to the ecstasy of biting into it, with the juice spilling all over your hand and face.

Then Jack died, his face pale and blue from the cold, any semblance of handsome or beautiful gone from his features, which were stiffening into place thanks to rigor mortis. He passed from this world without a single thought to the woman he loved, clutching his hand less than a foot away, for no reason other than the fact she had nothing else to clutch to.

When his facial expression became blank as death overcame him, Rose wasn't thinking of Jack either. The screams were more than faint and she had to concentrate to hear them at all. Her focuswas on neither Cal nor her mother, nor any person close to her. She was thinking instead of Oscar Wilde, and his witticisms which won him such applause, but guarded disdain at the same time.

She had had such a crush on the writer, and thiswas what she thought of as the soul of her lover leaked away from its physical confines.

Death and love are truly fickle beings, it seems.

Sometimes I think I insert Oscar Wilde into my fics too often xD