The Moon is on Fire

(A Titanic Fanfiction)

Disclaimer: Jim Cameron owns these gorgeous characters and everything to do with the 1997 film Titanic; this story is meant for entertainment purposes only!

Hey guys! This story has been pretty tame up to this point, but there is a bit of mature content toward the end of this chap, though of course it's tasteful and (at least I like to believe, haha) well-woven into the story. And in the future when chapters lean toward M I'll let you know here at the beginning as well. If it's not your cup of tea, you can skip!

Chapter Five: Hoopla

All of them, in pieces.

All of them were shredded as if a wild animal, claws akimbo, had boarded the ship and sniffed them out. Drawings that were gentle promises of Jack's talent, of how he took a little part of each soul he sketched, and how all those fragments became some alloy in him. That is Jack, after all, the alloy, the amalgam of a thousand places, a thousand people, all he has seen. I recalled how they'd cascaded from his portfolio in the days prior, those pictures, how I'd thumbed, how touching them made them become so much more than just some damned paper.

But I knew he'd make a million more.

Cal had strewn them across my unmade bed as if an indictment, the charcoal in a few places already smudging white fabric; it dawned on me then that he likely believed Jack and I had made love here in the suite, here on these fine sheets, here under the hot and incessant gaze of Hockley money, of all the ornaments paid for by the sweat and the blood of the workers in his mills. That he had been not only so headily cuckolded by a penniless artist but cuckolded in the same space he'd wanted me in, palms tight on my arms but I'd deflected each time. He never wanted me to finish this particular sojourn over the Atlantic as a virgin.

And I wasn't.

I felt blood pool at my temples and then drain into my sinus cavities, down my cheeks. It was such an exceedingly odd feeling to be proud of how my womanhood blossomed but at the same time incensed by the juvenile behavior of this man I'd attached myself to when I was weaker, lesser. The overlap was infuriating. But I could not erase him. Jack knew too much. My own heart knew too much. The only way through this anger was to stand next to the fire of it, stand in it perhaps. Stand in the fire and burn, bright, then begin to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

I was so achingly young. Jack was so achingly young. One day this would all be a memory, fading and fading into something so small we'd squint for it, squint to feel the details.

"Cal, what was the point of all this?" I turned back around and he was in the doorway, sizing me up for the upmteenth time but finally it did not make me wince, how his gaze lingered at the swell of my thighs then moved upward. I could still feel Jack's kisses along my throat, how his mouth had lingered where my tears had been and I felt imprinted. Tears, kiss, tears, kiss. Thick as ink. Jack's signature. I wanted it on me for the rest of my days (if he'd have me, after this) but first I had to say goodbye to what had preceded him, preceded this renaissance inside me. "How does destroying these make it better?" I became more livid as I spoke. The hours of Jack's life, discarded. The drawing of me, the one that had liberated my body, liberated even parts of my mind, now lay in five segments, strips upon a pillow. I grabbed for them, grabbed for any large pieces I could, and slid them inside the portfolio, which was miraculously unharmed.

"Nothing here can be made better, Rose, that's...quite childish to think." He cleared his throat (which I know is a tell for him, a tell for doubt), nodded, crossed his arms, loved to watch me scramble to save what I could. But I pitied him. More than anything, I pitied him. "Take the bastard his notebook if you must, I suppose it's all he really has of any value. A subjective concept to be sure."

I stood and I held Jack's leather to my chest, pressed it against my breasts and felt the rings still there pinched against my skin; we'd worried that if Jack held on to them and was searched at any point we'd be right back in the midst of disaster.

I approached Cal with a gusto he seemed surprised by and met his eyes straight on, straight into the black of them. My breath was heavy. The room was, besides us, still; my mother lingered out in the sitting room, I knew, but she was as quiet as a stone. To speak of wild animals...well, I was one now, pink-faced and determined, and certainly the opposite of what he wanted in a wife, a mate, however he conceived of it. He desired a refined, sleek creature, of course, a manicured thing, innocent save for the dark moments behind closed doors, molding, hovering on and in. Now, I was sure, I was utterly unmoldable, even for Jack, for anyone; I was, first and foremost, a new and independent version of myself.

"Childish?" I laughed with my mouth wide open in one exasperated gesture. "This scene is the most childish thing I've ever seen."

He seethed, God, he seethed, eyebrows raised. But I continued.

"You'll have your millions, Cal, there's no doubt, and I'm happy for you," metal, blood again in my mouth but I held back a little, felt that the power today came at least partially from maintaining poise, "but I never wanted any of it and I loathe everything it represents." I sighed and bit my lower lip, saw his scrutiny concentrate there at my mouth. In some twisted way did he want to kiss it now? Did he still want me? I secretly hoped that he did. Was I ill, for how delicious such a thought felt jumping around in my brain, felt down my throat? I hoped for it. That he imagined with fury the moment Jack touched me deep for the first time, touched the center of me. That Jack's freedom, his lightness, his youth, made Cal sick with jealousy. "Let it go, Cal, let it go." I swallowed, gathered a bit more courage. "It's not him you hate, it's me really, but let it go. And for Christ's sake, do not punish my mother for my sins." My voice, it croaked.

We stared at one another for twenty seconds. Twenty seconds can be an excruciatingly long time when it is occupied only by staring, and during this time I saw the wide pores of his face more clearly than I ever had before. I saw his age more clearly, the space between us. I saw the full theater of his emotions play across his skin and his eyes; the rage turned to sadness and back to rage a dozen times in this tiny window but it eventually settled on resignation, I'm sure of it.

"Take five minutes, damn it all to hell," he let a long breath out and lifted his fists to me once more but they fell, impotent, "and then be gone, Rose. Just be gone."

He left like a vampire must leave when the sun peeks over the horizon at dawn. I thought back to the first time he came to our house after I returned from school; Ruth had him over for tea and she'd adorned me accordingly, to look essentially like a yellow cake topped with icing to be devoured, and he'd entered the same way (in silence, an event that comes about discreetly). This exit, it was equally unceremonious, then, and I stared agape as Ruth walked to replace him in the room, her cheeks red like garnet and I realized the absence of absolution would be more prominent in her than in Cal. The real pain of goodbye would never have been about him. I never really wanted him. And to him I was infinitely replaceable.

But she was my mother. I'd always want her, I'd always wonder.

"Mother," I dropped the portfolio to the bed and followed it, collapsed in a sitting position with my hands propped behind me, heart palpitating, "please tell me you have a plan of some sort. He won't…" I swallowed, looked at a wall. "He can't be trusted, no matter the little pockets of generosity, right now, he's forever a snake and…"

"Rose, I know it, don't you think I know it. Please." She looked old to me for the first time, which is preposterous because she is only forty-four. I think her skin has somehow thinned from the stress, becoming partially transparent. I used to feel such guilt for it. But no more could I bear the weight of this world and all the people in it. "But it would have worked, it would have worked for us." Oddly, she didn't even look as though she believed her own words. "We have a place and we stay in it...it's not ideal but there aren't any other real choices. We've spoken of this, we spoke of this again and again, Rose." She sounded monotone throughout this little monologue, then moved to the closet; wordlessly she rummaged for one of the suitcases we'd brought on board, a small leather square, soft as butter, that my father had gifted her many years ago and now typically held my keepsakes on long journeys.

"Mother it's not true, not for either of us." She paused with her back to me. "That's what I'm doing, I'm making a different choice. I want to be happy. Mother."

I was not prepared for what came next, for I had hoped that Cal's departure from the suite would allow her and I to speak, to reconcile one percent, to formulate some future in which we might at least stay in touch. Hold on to one another in some way.

But she laid the case on the bed and spoke above my head, spoke an inferno somehow inside the voice of a bird.

"Our name was, I suppose, in some ways already ruined," a pause and I grabbed for the sheets around me, I suppose to feel grounded as she spoke, "but you were the hope, you were unblemished, you were pristine Rose, now that's gone. To let that boy defile you, it astounds and it disgusts me." I looked down and felt the bottom fall out of us. Our family was ruined, indeed, but not by the money lost or the status degraded or the fact of my loving Jack or trusting him with my body. It was ruined by her failure to see me, see me as anything besides a girl she raised in this honeyed, monied milieu, and I raised my eyes to hers only for the amount of time it took to ask her to leave the room, to give me the five minutes that Cal had dictated and no more.

I felt him begin to move in me.

It was slow, at first, but the way it broke through the initial pain, it felt like light coming through wet trees after a storm. A sigh of relief. A revelation. His thumb swept across my bottom lip, tasting like salt on a flick of my tongue, and he shifted up a few inches, looked down at me. I could see both the pleasure and the patience in his eyes, an extraordinary combination. It shook me, for how tender it was.

"Are you alright?" He moved again, testing, and I moved with him this time, pushed up and into him and felt tears pooling in the outer corners of my eyes from the fullness. From everything. I watched the sweat beading on his forehead, felt it on mine. I was more than alright.

"I'm more than alright, Jack." It was a whisper but it was definitive and he smiled, reached to steady himself on a window pane behind us with one hand, grabbed my right thigh and curled it upward with the other. And then we moved together and it was gorgeously more commanding with every second, the need expressed so bluntly.

I had never imagined it like this. All the stories, all the great novels, they cut off before or after these moments and I'd spent years trying to understand what intimacy was or if it was worth it, if it was something I could see myself inside. Spoken of in murmurs by the women I knew, spoken of as duty, something not too far removed from suffering.

I grabbed at him, felt savage, unleashed, groaned whenever his hands moved, each instant his mouth did. Shame, cast off, flown away.

Those poor, poor women, I thought, covered in sweat and covered in him (him him him him him).

They were so very wrong.

I arrived at Molly's door ten minutes later with the small suitcase sparsely packed. I had taken only essentials, pulling from drawers with the exhaustion and the tears threatening my vision until nothing much mattered. I wanted as little of what Cal had wrought as possible. Warm stockings, utilitarian things. A hairbrush with a quartz handle, passed down to me from my father's mother. Two dresses. I took all of two dresses and even they seemed too much. Two. Of the forty-five packed away in trunks, folded elaborately into boxes.

Two.

And I thought about the photograph on the bedroom dresser, the one Trudy always unpacked when we traveled long distances: my mother and I, when I was eight years old, on a rocky shore in Maine, somehow smiling and God, yes, there had been a time when we sunk into one another, when the love was more palpable. I should have grabbed the little frame, seized it. If for nothing else but all the days onward, for later, when this stinging was less. What is family, really, I wondered, as I waited in front of the white door that looked like all the other white doors on this ship. Could Jack and I make a family, could we be comfort for one another, orphans literally and figuratively but sheltered underneath each other?

I felt dizzy. This was the way I used to feel a million years ago (at least it seemed) when I danced, when my ballet instructor would run routines with us for hours and hours, tiny sips of water all that broke up an obsessive, compulsive practice that made our tiny bodies lean and lithe and deprived for art's sake.

"I imagined that you might be here any minute, child," she spoke loudly at me, alarming my reverie, and pulled me inside, "Jack sent me a note, and I'd already heard all the talk anyway, as I'm sure comes as completely unsurprising. Let's pour some goddamned Brandy and figure out what we're going to do, alright?"

Jack. Just his name. The plan, it was playing out, all of it, but I wanted to be with him for it. I wanted to curl up inside the curve of his arm, the crook of it, and sleep. Sleep for a thousand hours.

Molly, with those warm eyes, right now full of varying degrees of alarm and concern. Molly with her hair down today, chestnut brown and flowing in waves. I barely knew her, really. Before Titanic we'd seen her at J.J. Astor's parties, for they were, unbelievably, dear friends, but never had we sought Molly out. I'd wanted to, drawn in by the intrigue of her untraditional story and her guffawing laughter, but my mother had prevented a close association. Here on the ship, though, she'd been a lifeline, a glimmer of modernity bursting, new, at old seams. She'd taken to Jack, she understood Jack, and I only hoped she might understand what he and I wished to be together.

"Could I trouble you for some water?" She looked blurry. The whole room, it looked blurry.

Molly brought a cold glass to my lips but it was too late.

"Rose. Rose! Rose!"

And I heard my name, just over and over from her lips, as I fell to the floor. Fainted, from the density of it all.

Author's Note: I promise there's SO MUCH MORE JACK ON THE WAY! And more Jack and Rose on the ship...after all, there's still one evening left before they hit New York ;)

Cheers, as always, and thanks for reading!

xxRGD