Never Letting Go
Where is she? She couldn't possibly have gone so far... Jack's heartbeat quickened as his eyes scanned the surroundings hectically. Damn. A mere hour ago, he had been so sure he and Rose could just forget their tragic past and move on. However, luck was not on their side today.
"Rose!" he hollered again.
"I'm here, Jack!" she finally called back and he spun around in the direction of her voice. It came from behind the chestnut tree in the backyard, whose trunk was so big that several people could stand behind it without being spotted from the house.
When he found her leaning against its deeply furrowed trunk, she didn't even bother to look up at him. She was too busy trying to light a hand-rolled cigarette, but the fair wind that had sprung up, blew out the matches almost instantly. After watching her for a moment, he asked, "What are you doing here? Are you hiding from someone?"
"I don't want Mrs. Sulllivan to see me smoking, now," she mumbled, still fumbling with the matches and groaned in exasperation as the wind blew out another one.
She lit a third one and in silence, Jack cupped his right hand around the match to shield the flame from the wind. The flame flickered violently for a moment and then disappeared to a thin grey streak of smoke.
"Try again," he prompted her quietly and she got out yet another match from the box. This time, he shielded the flame with both his hands while Rose leant forward with the cigarette in her mouth. This time, the match burnt just long enough to light the cigarette.
"Thanks." She took a deep drag and Jack saw her tense body relax a little.
"You're welcome," he replied, trying to sound as hearty and confident as possible. Maybe, she's just a little upset and she'll quickly calm herself, he thought hopefully.
"That was a pretty awkward situation when the boys were asking us if we were married. Have you seen how Mrs. Sullivan was looking at us?" he asked her, once again forcing his voice to a jovial tone. It didn't come out very convincing. Their frowned upon cohabitation was not what was preying on her mind and he knew it only too well.
But Rose was barely listening anyway. The only response she gave was a small shrug.
Jack leaned next to her against the tree, his shoulders barely touching hers. While Rose was focusing again on the act of smoking, he was mentally preparing himself for what was to come. He'd never been a coward but he dreaded the conversation he knew he could no longer avoid.
Rose seemed to know that, because she was giving him time. Or is she scared, too? he wondered. Yes, she is. But there's more. He studied her face intently, but it was one of these moments when her emotions were hard to read – even for him.
With the nonchalance of a dock laborer, Rose flipped the stub of her cigarette to the side, causing Jack's lips to curve into a genuine smile in spite of himself, in spite of the situation.
"What is it?" She looked at him, a puzzled frown on her face.
"It's just… you know, the way you do things." His reply only seemed to deepen her confusion. "To think that you were a first class lady on her way to get married... it seems so odd. I can't even imagine you wearing one of those elaborate gowns any longer."
He smiled hopefully at her, again trying his best to cheer her up, but she wasn't receptive to it.
"It's just so… I realized that..." she said, but then trailed off, looking past him. He had already started wondering if he had said something wrong when she finally continued to speak. "Fabrizio... Mr. Andrews... the little girl you were dancing with and her father and all the other people..." Jack winced at hearing their names but Rose continued unperturbedly, "It feels so wrong! It's so hard to accept that so many lives have ended where mine has begun," she finally explained, carefully choosing her words.
The sadness in her eyes was breaking his heart. "Look, Rose, let's just forget it! Imagine Ralph and Joseph had never said those things! It was just bad luck," he said with a pleading tone in his voice.
"Bad luck," she echoed, her face tensing again. "It wasn't bad luck. Think about it! How many people did we meet, how many people did we actually talk to since we came here? It's been more than a month now and did we ever really try to make friends with anybody? Do you know anybody besides our landlady and her sons by name? We hardly ever talked to people if we didn't have to. We were living in our own little world all the time."
Jack stared into space for a moment. She was right, but he didn't want to hear it. "But the sinking happened two months ago, already. Another couple of months and people will forget it ever happened," he said as optimistically as he could, but Rose shook her head.
"No. That's not what's going to happen. Of course, public interest will eventually wear off a little, but I don't think it is ever going to end. It's not any ship that had sank. It was the ship that men thought was unsinkable, the biggest and most luxurious ship of all time." She paused for a moment, Cal and his swollen-headed entourage appearing in front of her mind's eye. She shook her head again as if trying to shake off the memory, before continuing her speech in a steady voice. "It's not going to end so soon. Even if we lived another hundred years, there'd be a hundred Titanic anniversaries. Maybe they'll even write books or make films about it someday! It won't stop and we can't isolate us from the rest of the world forever! And even if the sinking of the Titanic was somehow magically wiped out of everybody's memories – How could we, who had gone through this hell, just forget and move on with our lives, pretending that nothing bad has ever happened?"
He looked at her intently, pondering what she had said and not quite knowing how to respond to it. After dealing with letter to Fabrizio's mother, he had thought that everything was going to be alright. He had thought that they might never have to think of the sinking ever again. Absentmindedly, he let his hand skim over the tree bark, feeling its rippled surface. We have done everything we could, haven't we? Why is it still haunting us? He couldn't fathom why, but for some reason he felt personally defeated.
Rose was right, this was permanent. A dark frightening cloud that would cast its shadow upon their days as long as they lived. He couldn't bring back the dead, no matter how much he wanted it. He couldn't turn back time, either. He couldn't even take comfort from the idea that his friends had died a quick and painless death, because he knew that the cold had stabbed them like a thousand knives, mercilessly, until their exhausted bodies drifted to a sleep they'd never wake up from.
Jack squinted his eyes as he stared at the horizon, into the setting sun. Minutes had ticked by already when suddenly, out of nowhere, a thought hit Jack.
"I wouldn't have made it without you," he blurted out, turning around so their eyes could meet. "When I was tied to that damn pipe! The water was waist deep already and rising fast, but you… you came back to me to chop off my handcuffs with an axe." Rose looked at him in bewilderment, his statement surprising her as much as it surprised him.
"But it was me who got you in there in the first place," she finally whispered, avoiding his gaze for a moment.
"No!" He exclaimed loudly. Compared to their previous subdued conversation, he was almost shouting now. "It was Cal who got me in this. It was you who'd risked her life to get me out," he said, emphasizing every word.
Her lips curved into a timid smile. "I was so afraid," she said in a little voice.
"I know. I was scared like shit, too." He cupped her face in his hands. "But you came back in spite of everything. What you did was incredibly brave, you know that?"
She gave a hesitant nod. "I don't even know myself where that courage came from."
"Wherever it came from, I'm sure there's plenty more," he said, and tears began forming in her eyes at the honesty and admiration in his voice. She was trembling slightly, but the wind had little to do with it.
"And when you jumped back from the life boat, I just… I was shocked beyond belief that you would do that, that you would refuse to be saved just to be with me." There, he stopped for a second, licking his lips and gathering himself and his jumbled emotions. It might have been easier to talk about this than he had thought, but it still wasn't easy per se. "But at the same time, I was also relieved to know that I won't be alone in this and I swore to myself that we would make it out alive," he said, his voice faltering, but his eyes shining with conviction. His heart skipped a beat when he saw her smile again.
"I wouldn't... I just couldn't have..." she said shakily, but before she could finish her sentence, he crushed her against his chest. She brought up her arms around his neck and took a deep breath, inhaling his scent until the trembling subsided.
Then, she backed off a few inches to look straight into his eyes. "You would have done the same thing for me, Jack. You did everything to make sure I would survive even if it meant that you... that you would..." She felt a new rush of tears welling up in her eyes at the memory and paused for a moment to gulp them down. "When we were in the water, in midst of all these people... screaming… fighting for breath. And the cold… When we found that floating piece of debris and only one of us could fit on it... You gave it to me! You could have swum off or tried to save yourself, but you gave it to me and made sure I was safe!"
"Yes, but another piece of debris had surfaced and I…" Jack began, but Rose cut him off. "It was pure luck that it submerged right next to us, because you wouldn't have moved an inch from my side. Try to remember!" She prompted him and noticing his reluctant expression, she added, "Trust me."
Jack nodded and closed his eyes, forcing himself to think back to that fateful night.
He remembered the moment they plunged into the freazing North Atlantic and the closest place to hell he had ever been to. Everywhere around them was chaos, hundreds of men and women screaming, moaning and trashing.
He remembered seeing Rose being pushed down by a panicking man and himself smashing his fist into the man's face until he let go off her.
And then the floating door that he helped Rose climb onto and that was too small to support them both. And the thoughts ringing in his head as he clung to the debris and the cold was creeping its way to his heart. 'I've got to save her. She's not going to die out here. She's not. I've got to save her. No matter what it takes.'
He remembered that he was already starting to choke on his breath and that his limbs were going numb when Rose pointed to a swimming debris that had surfaced not far from them – another piece of wood that would save his life as the first one would save hers. Like by the hand of some higher force that didn't want him to die that night, it had split from Titanic as she was sinking to her watery grave. There was no doubt that they had both been lucky beyond belief.
But you were ready to die to make sure she would live! an inner voice told him steadfastly and he remembered the words he had let her promise to him:
"You must do me this honor... promise me you will survive... that you will never give up... no matter what happens... no matter how hopeless... promise me now, and never let go of that promise."
"You're right," he whispered as he opened his eyes again that had now filled with tears, too. She pulled him closer, holding him in a tight embrace. And for the first time since the sinking he was able to feel something new and different about that night.
He had stood up for another person! He knew he would have given anything to make sure Rose survived and if that panel of wood hadn't appeared out of the darkness of the Atlantic, he would have died most certainly. Before Titanic, He had sometimes questioned himself if one day, he'd be able to commit the ultimate sacrifice: To give his life for a person he loves. In the icy waters of the ocean, he had made that decision in a split second. Jack had always imagined it to be the most difficult decision of his life, when in fact, it was the easiest.
His parents would have been so proud.
xxxxx
The next morning, Rose and Jack were packing their bags in silence. While Jack was walking to and fro in the room, searching for lost things, Rose stood beside the table, folding Jack's and her clothes to neat piles.
When she laid her overcoat on the table, the heart of the ocean dropped out of the pocket, bounced over the edge of the table and landed by Jack's feet, causing him to leap in surprise and to exclaim in exasperation, "You're carrying it around like this? In your coat pocket?"
"Sorry."
"It's ok. Just... find a safer place for it, please." he said, brushing away a strand of hair that had fallen over his face.
"I'll sew a hidden pocket in my skirt like the girl in Paris you told me about. That's the best I can do for now," she said.
He lifted his eyebrows in astonishment. "You know how to do that?"
"Well, that's one of the few things they had taught me in finishing school that I suspect has any merit," she said with a playful smile, and pulled out a needle and threat from their bags.
While she was busy sewing a scrap of fabric to her skirt, Jack bent down to take a closer look of the diamond that was still lying on the wooden floor, glittering tantalizingly in the light of the morning sun. Just looking at it sent a shiver down his spine. I guess, I'll never get used to seeing this thing, he thought and picked it up cautiously as if he feared that the blue stone could burn his hand.
"It's so heavy," he said, placing the diamond at the side of the table. "I've forgotten how heavy it is."
"I haven't," Rose stated matter-of-factly and Jack had a hunch that she was not only talking about its physical weight.
He nodded, understanding and continued to put their things in order. Rose sewed in silence, allowing her thoughts to wander.
"You know what?" Jack heard her utter after a some time had passed. "Maybe, it's not a bad thing that the Titanic is going to be remembered. Maybe it's going to change the way people think," she added and looked at his face as if she was planning to say more.
"Yeah... maybe," he said lamely.
She put away her sewing things and slowly stepped closer to him, until they were standing only a few inches apart. He felt her warm breath against his skin as she whispered softly, "I'll never forget that night, Jack." He knew instantly which night she was talking about and took her hand, squeezing it gently. She started crying softly, but when she continued to speak, her voice did not sound the least bit sad or regretful. "I'll never forget what you said to me and I'll never forget what I promised you... And I'm happy about that!"
He brought her hand up to his face and placed a gentle kiss on her fingers, before leaning his forehead against hers. Somewhere in the back of his head, he could still hear the lapping of the waves and the faint echo of her voice.
„I promise. I will never let go, Jack. I'll never let go."
AN: I had to decide whether I wanted to wait one month until my loyal but very busy beta-reader would revise this chapter or post it right away with hopefully not more than a few mistakes. Well, since I had promised myself to update more frequently, I've posted the unbetaed version. If you have found any mistakes or just want to leave a comment, which I would appreciate very much, please review!
