A/N: When I decided to do the gender swapped roles, essentially making Ricky the "Rose" of the story and Adrian the "Jack," I never realized how difficult some of the key alternate scenes would be, so I had to get kind of creative about it in this chapter. Enjoy!

The Secret Life Of The Titanic

Chapter One

He could imagine himself getting lost in the waves; sinking beneath the Atlantic foam, buried in a place where his father could never find him again. Not that he wanted to drown, though. That thought scared the hell out of him. The idea of knowing for several minutes that you were dying, and all the while suffering, was something he didn't want. Quick and easy was his style. As a child he'd spent years alone in his bed, wishing the night would take him as he slept. But alas, he had not been so fortunate.

Richard fingered the satin bowtie at his throat and then slid his fingers down his chest, into the inner flap of his suit. When he pulled them back out, his hand was clamped so tight his knuckles were as white as the water churning from the back of the Titanic. He turned his hand over and unwound his fingers, revealing a miniature gun, with a pearl grip and a sterling silver trigger. He tossed the gun between his palms, relishing the hot metal – warmed from pressing against his chest all night – against his cool skin.

Several minutes passed and Richard still found himself alone. He'd excused himself from dinner by complaining of sea sickness, knowing that nobody in his party would bother to follow him out and thus give up valuable food or socialization just to see if he was alright. He leisurely lifted the mouth of the gun to his head and pressed it to his left temple, gauging the feel of the metal. He tossed the gun to his other hand and then pressed it to the right temple, trying to decide the most comfortable angle.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Richard paused, without taking the gun away from his head. He didn't turn around to see who the voice belonged to, but he knew it was female, and certainly not a voice he'd known before. "Well you're not me, are you?"

"Come on, what can a pretty white boy like you possibly have to be so upset about that he wants to off himself on the maiden voyage of The Ship of Dreams? The fact that I even have to ask that is ridiculous."

Richard used his left hand to grab the railing; it was frigid to the touch, but he didn't pull it back. He mused over the words 'pretty white boy' before finally turning around, his finger still on the trigger. Standing across the deck was a plain clothed young woman, roughly about his age, with shiny black hair and olive skin. "Steerage, aren't you?" he bit back, judging by her clothing and skin color. "What are you even doing up here?"

"Doing what steerage does best," she sniped, crossing her arms. "Sneaking into places we shouldn't, like the vermin we are." She tossed her black hair over her shoulder. "On second thought, why don't you just get it over with, yeah?" She mimed a gun with her fingers and aimed it at her head, before making popping noises with her puckered lips. "That way I can pilfer what's left from your corpse and sell it to buy booze and use it to escape my lowly existence."

His finger fell from the trigger and he eased up the pressure of the pistol against his temple. "What's your name?"

"What's it to you?"

"Curiosity's all."

She sauntered closer, looking him up and down. "Yours first, Sir." The last word spilled out contemptuously.

"Richard."

"Richard…" She stuck out her lower lip and simultaneously shook her head. "…what?"

"Underwood."

"Ahhh…" She clicked her tongue to the roof up of her mouth and lazily extended her hand to him. "Lee."

"Lee?" Richard shifted his eyes suspiciously between her hand and her face. "What do you think you're doing, Lee?"

"Isn't this how your people greet each other?" she spat. "With a kiss on the hand? Or is steerage exempt?"

Richard narrowed his eyes, then released his free hand from the railing and slid it beneath the Latina's, before raising the back of her hand to his lips and kissing it tenderly. His lips tingled against her skin, which, for a low class passenger, was much softer than he expected.

As his lips pulled away from the back of her hand, she suddenly drew it away, backhanding Richard from the chin, diagonally across his face. The pistol went flying from his hand and skidded across the deck as its owner lost his balance and stumbled onto his ass, against the railing. The Latina jogged over to the pistol and picked it up, before aiming it at Richard. "That would be Adrian Lee, for the record."

Richard could feel the heat from the slap radiating off his face. From experience, he knew it was probably turning a hot tomato color. As that occurred to him, he also began to taste a salty flavor in his mouth and instinctively touched his lip, which he found to be bleeding; bit, when Adrian had backhanded him. "How much do you want?" he sighed.

Adrian scoffed and waved his gun. "Stand up."

"Just shoot me if you're going to. It's nothing I wasn't going to do."

"How about I blow your knees out? Or put a hole in your foot? I strongly suspect you didn't want to suffer, otherwise you wouldn't have had this aimed at your skull."

Richard grunted and pulled himself into a standing position, using the railing for support. "What do you want?" he asked again.

Adrian edged over to him, keeping him at bay with the pistol. "My brother used to have one like this." She dropped the gun into her other hand and admired it. "Half-brother, actually, on my pop's side; my dad's first wife, second kid." She rolled her eyes. "I was the bastard baby. His mom came from money though, married him before my mother and her family ever told him I existed. But she died in childbirth and he and my dad never got along. He offed himself about five years back, his mother's family blamed my dad, and they kicked him out and took back their family fortune. My parents happened to reconnect a little over a year later, that's when I first met him, and I didn't even know I had a brother until he told me last year, in the midst of a real drunken stupor. I never could understand it, how a rich kid could be so unhappy. You've got everything you could possibly want, so…why do you want to die?"

"Well when you have everything, what else is there?"

"Wrong answer." Adrian pointed the pistol at the ocean and fired a single shot into the water. Afterwards, she placed the gun to her lips and inhaled the scent from the pistol. "Always did love the smell of a freshly fired rifle. You know, if my dad had been born with your skin, he might have been an officer of the law. Too bad, right Ricky?"

"Richard."

Adrian shrugged. "Formalities. You upper class and your regal sounding names; I don't understand it."

"Richard?"

Adrian and Richard both turned at the unexpected voice. It was male and laced with a faint Italian accent. Across the deck, near where Adrian had been standing when she found Richard, they saw a rotund man in a black tux, with a wary look on his face.

"Is there a problem here?" he said slowly, deliberately. His eyes were on Adrian, and more specifically, the gun she held in her hands, pointed at Richard. "I'm sure whatever it is-"

"Mr. Boykewich!" Richard interjected, shaking his head. "No problem." He smiled jovially and grasped Adrian's wrist with one of his hands. "I was just showing Miss Lee how to shoot."

Mr. Boykewich perked a brow. "Is that so?" he inched closer, looking between the pair suspiciously.

"Leo Boykewich, Adrian Lee. Adrian Lee, Leo Boykewich," Richard introduced, waving his hands between the two. "I thought some fresh air might help my upset stomach," he lied. "So I took a stroll out on deck. That's how we ran into each other. We started talking and…and she told me about a pistol her brother used to own, so I showed her mine and…"

"He offered to teach me how to shoot it." She feigned innocence. "My dad never let me near guns as a child…always the ever protective father."

Leo nodded quietly. "I see." He licked his lips. "Carry on then," he nodded, retrieving a cigar from his inner pocket. "Don't mind me."

Adrian and Richard exchanged looks, then Richard slipped behind Adrian and slid his hands up the length of her arms, before adjusting them around her hands. He leaned his face into her shoulder and whispered through her hair, "Just play along." He adjusted her arms into the correct shooting position, then placed his index finger over hers, curved around the trigger. "Now raise your arm like so and-"

Adrian pulled back on the trigger. There was a faint kickback which jutted her hand against Richard's. "I think I got this," she whispered back, smugly confident. "Too bad I don't have anything for target practice."

This time Richard pulled the trigger shooting off another bullet into the water. Despite the darkness, he could see the faint splash of where the bullet had hit. Without thinking about it, he allowed one of his hands to drop from Adrian's arm to her waist, where he rested it upon her hip.

"Don't get ahead of yourself, First Class." Adrian fired off the gun twice more, but when she tried a third time, it popped. Just to be sure, she pulled back the trigger a second and third time, and was only rewarded with pops. Satisfied that the chamber was empty, she eased herself out of Richard's grasp and gave a friendly wave towards Leo. "Wonderful teacher, this one."

Leo nodded. "He's a good boy," he agreed.

"Richard!"

Adrian whipped her head around at the shrill feminine voice, only to see Zoe approaching. She raised her eyebrows at Richard as the brunette's emerald satin heels clacked against the wooden dock. Her eyes spotted the diamond on the woman's hand immediately and she scoffed beneath her breath as Zoe threw her arms around Richard's neck.

"I thought you were going back to your room. What are you doing out here?" She peered at Adrian from the corner of her eye. "It's too cold out here, you're liable to catch a disease."

Richard shifted uncomfortably as Zoe clung to him. He could see his father and a select group of other first class passengers from his dinner party also approaching, no doubt for a smoke before they returned to their cabins, and he exhaled softly. "Right, of course." He bowed lightly to Adrian, much to Zoe's disgust, and nodded gentlemanly towards Leo. "Until next time."

"Evening, Richard!" Leo tipped his hat as Zoe carted Richard off towards their party.

"It was nice meeting you," Adrian muttered awkwardly. "I should probably get going as well, my friend's waiting on me." As she turned to leave, she felt Leo's hand on her arm.

"Thank you," he said as she turned back.

"For what?"

Leo looked back at Richard as he was pulled back into the Titanic with his party. He nodded. "I think we both know the answer to that."

Adrian felt her breath catch in the back of her throat. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said finally, and broke away before releasing a puff of white breath into the cold Atlantic air. She couldn't see Richard or the people he'd been with anymore and she had no intention of turning back to look at Leo. Her stomach felt heavy, as if she'd eaten too much, despite the fact that she hadn't had a thing to eat since some grits and biscuits at breakfast. It growled beneath her clothes and began to churn as she thought about Richard and the situation she'd just prevented. He was unhappy, that much was clear. "And I won't be there next time…"