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!

Heads up all, this chapter does contain some mature content, winkity wink. If that's not your thing, you know what to do.

Cheers!

Chapter 6: I'm a Sky Kid

I begged her to turn the heater off. She'd had a tea cart brought in and I smelled first jasmine and then the smokiness of oolong. I wanted to retch. Retch. Any other Monday in any other universe and I would have taken my tea and stared blankly at a wall, daydreamed my way into an afternoon. Suffocated, yes, but there had been stability in the boredom. I now had absolutely none to speak of.

Stability, I mean.

"I have a tendency to faint actually, Molly," I rubbed my hands down my cheeks to get the blood flowing, "since I was a small child, when I got overly excited or worried. I suppose I'm very much both right now." Sighing, I leaned forward and hugged my knees, felt equilibrium returning but acutely aware of the nausea still brewing at the bottom of my belly. At the ready, this new brand of anxiety, at the ready. This is what Jack meant, this is what he worried for, wasn't it, this realization in me that I was leaving everything and everyone behind. An extremely concentrated earthquake just with its pace slowed down. "Molly, we don't have much of a plan, really, it's all so…"

I hadn't eaten so it was just bile threatening up the column of my throat but it burned, dammit, it burned.

"Rose, you don't have to tell me how it is or what it is," she sat beside me on the long Queen Anne chaise, upholstered wildly in teal and gold (colors my delicate constitution could barely tolerate at the moment), "young love, new love, getting so worked up by someone that you wish to burn your whole world down for them." I blushed, for it was the first time someone had acknowledged it, verbalized it, directed something other than ire in my direction for it. She took my hand. "Darlin', I almost invented this move, you know?" I shook my head. I had no idea in the world what she spoke of.

"Rose, I'm sure you know this, but I was born in a shack in Missouri," she tilted her head and I knew the look in her, this fervor at telling her story, "they called it a cottage but it was a glorified shack, to be sure, and mud used to come up in the floorboards when it rained because I'm sure whoever built the damn thing didn't put down any sort of a proper foundation." I laughed and it felt nice to be distracted, honestly, by anything. "I worked in a factory when I was younger than you. I knew what it was to be hungry. All this to say, I had high hopes I'd marry above my station as they say, pull the family up, fatten our purse a bit. I had suitors, businessmen." Eyes twinkling, she reached over to the cart and then handed me a tiny ivory tea cup filled halfway with liquid, wrapped it and my hands in her grip in the passing over as if I could scarcely handle the task. "But then of course, as these things go, one day I'm working in a department store in Leadville, Colorado, and in walks a man who looked like the cat that ate the canary and the minute he did a little bow in my direction I knew I was done for."

"J.J.?" I met her gaze. I'd heard about their separation. No one spoke of him on this ship save for her. She told the stories, roared with laughter, it was all hers, but no one had dared tried to put anything into context in front of her.

She nodded. "You wouldn't know it now but we were…" She finally let me have the tea and leaned back, looked me over as if to gage my suitability as a receptacle for such information. I must have passed the test by the newfound tumult in my face. A few days ago I was just angry and my naivete showed. Now I was complex, wasn't I? "We were inseparable, just manic for one another, breaking all custom in the beginning to be together, pure scandal." My head felt hot. Not just my cheeks but also my ears. She knew. She knew! "We were married three months later but I'd have probably gone for it three days in."

"I think I understand." I took a long warm sip but felt a shiver up my spine like a schoolgirl. "It's scary to feel this way. I questioned it. I'd be lying if I said I still wasn't questioning it on some level."

"Well, that makes you already infinitely smarter than me, and at not much more than your age." She paused, seeming to want to absorb some of my youth. She let me pause, let me drink, watched me take deep breaths. "I'm trying to do every good thing I can with the money, you know, but that all came later. I married him when he had about ten dollars in his pocket, Rose darlin'. He had nothing, we made it work with almost nothing."

I let the coincidence and the harmony of the words lay over me like a blanket. Ten minutes earlier I'd fainted but now, blissfully, I'd woken right where I was supposed to be. Molly could never have known what Jack said to me in the gymnasium. It was like a message postmarked from the heavens.

There was at last no urgency; for the first time in days there was no real threat besides the uncertainty, which seemed for intervals to scamper off and hide itself beneath the baseboards. "I know enough about you, I sense enough, to trust your judgment of people, of a situation." Molly spoke again and rubbed my back and I ached for my mother, but ached for some kind of mothering I don't think Ruth ever quite mastered. Not even when I was little, did she, for she let the maids and the governesses do so much of this part of it all. "And I knew that you two were in love already by the time I came around on that deck, with the sun setting behind you and the excitement in your eyes, how you tried to tamp it down." My heart jumped, twice, then skipped an entire beat. "It was written on your faces, both of you. Even Ruth knew in an instant and that's why she's so angry, Rose. Even she is not so dead inside to miss it, what it looks like on someone. Let alone her daughter."

I'd never seen Molly this stripped down. I'd never seen any of the women in our set this stripped down.

"Rose you should have seen how he looked after you, as you walked away, how he watched every movement of your limbs." She smiled and her cheeks were rosy little circles. "It is how every woman wishes to be looked at."

To think that we had been so innocent in those first moments, it made every subsequent realization turn my heart into a hummingbird.

For the first time I allowed myself to believe that my mother's immediate reaction to all that had happened might be motivated by fear. For the first time I allowed myself to understand that when she came to me the morning before, as I dressed, she was saying that she knew: that she knew I wanted Jack and she wished I could have him.

"It's like a bird on a breeze," I began to cry, then, in the description of it, but they were tears of joy to find this validation, "like a bird finding a breeze, that's how it feels to be with him, Molly."

Jack made me a poet. Loving him so suddenly and so completely like this, it made me a poet.

"Then you have to fly, don't you, sweet girl?" And she wiped tears from my cheeks as a mother would, gently with her thumbs, because she knew what I needed and why I needed it.

She solved a mystery for me as well: the fate of the stewards on the hunt under Lovejoy's command, the ones we'd seen open the doors of the Renault after we'd hurriedly evacuated it. They were ruddy-faced and embarrassed when they'd seen the windows fogged, figured us out but were too late to make the discovery in real time. Thank God.

"Mr. Andrews headed them off, dear, at almost midnight." Unbelievable. Two allies. We had two quite incredible allies. "They were headed to your suite to stir the pot, play into Cal's hands I'm sure. Mr. Andrews told them it was of no consequence if you two were down there, lied and said he'd given you permission."

And that was when she winked, a thick and burdened wink that weighed a million pounds.

There was so much more to discuss but I remember little else of that afternoon because I spent most of it sleeping. Molly did not have an extra bed in her suite but she generously gave me hers, slipped a nightdress over my head, a huge cotton one the color of coffee with cream, and rubbed a eucalyptus balm on my chest as if I were a child languid in a sick bed. I dreamt of the future, tentatively, images that were sepia and soaked, hazy but I could make them out. Riding a horse on a beach, right in the surf, black boots on my feet, enamored of the black boots, in awe of the way the sea's spray hit them. Jack on a pier, sketching. Roads and roads and path after path, pine trees, us winding through them.

When I awoke Molly had been to see him and she handed me a piece of white paper, folded over three times. I felt an electric jolt right through my chest, heart and all the muscles around it, because I knew what it was. Of course I knew what it was.

The crinkle of it as I rushed to open it, so loud it could have been gunfire.

Meet me down here at 7, general room, Molly will help. One more real party on this ship.

lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

When I descended the stairs I saw him immediately. And it seemed as if a lifetime had passed since I was here before, dancing then with an abandon I had not yet earned.

Had I earned it, now?

There were at least a hundred people in the common area, a veritable jumble, a sea of such dynamic bodies and gray smoke, but my eyes were trained now, I suppose, to find him. A gravitational pull. And I swallowed, hovering with five steps to go because I wanted to watch him. Before he knew I was watching, I wanted to see. I needed, for just a brief window, to be a voyeur. This man, this person, who had in three days become a center of my world, but somehow I still felt outside him here. The way we'd examined each other's faces and voices and bodies and there had been so little time but we'd blown up the entire world within it...at least that's how it felt. There was so much of him I didn't know, couldn't know, yet.

He was laughing and a woman with chocolate hair half up and half down leaned forward to catch the tail end of whatever he was saying. Jack is quiet sometimes, gregarious sometimes, but he is infinitely affable. These were the things I adored. I thought about him at dinner two nights before, the seamless way by which he looked for the best in everyone at that horrid table and slipped into the cracks, finding a way to make the most embittered among them smile. But something pulled at the edges of my abdomen, here, as I watched the smooth lines of his jaw move. It was some kind of itch that I suppose was jealousy. I'd never felt it before. I'd never cared enough before. Butterflies pranced in my stomach, which was thankfully and finally full of a fair amount of food because Molly had insisted I eat, for fear I'd faint again.

Jack leaned back. The woman leaned forward. I hated it.

His body, its leanness, and how limber, and all I could think was that it certainly was mine in some way now, wasn't it? I did not want to be possessed or be a possessor but after last night I could feel him on me like a second skin that fluttered just above the first one. A sheen of him. Something in the lust was about possession. It had to be! And I was maddened by feeling this flustered. I was thinking of it, of his tanned stomach (for how was it even tanned?) and how I'd trailed my hand down the thin layer of hair on it, how I'd touched the hardness of him without any hesitation. It had been waiting for me.

And that's when he saw me and my face burned red at all of it, at those thoughts but also at how he turned his full attention to me in an instant, my fears allayed in the instant that those eyes saw only me. Somehow, it was only me, and I made haste with the final steps, then with the five or so yards between us; without hesitation I entered his arms, melted into him, and it was provocative, I thought, still provocative to me to touch someone in public this unabashedly.

I realized in that moment that I believed his warm embrace might actually solve any imaginable problem. Turn trauma into elation.

"This is so wonderfully strange." I spoke into his chest and I wasn't sure he could even hear me above the din of a nearby card game and a group of musicians in the corner testing out a nascent melody. But he must have, because in response he pulled me closer and rubbed a thumb subtly along my rib cage, pressed into three of the bones there for just a few seconds. And then we were thrust back into the ambience. I can't for the life of me remember what any of it was about, the story he'd been in the middle of, but it was lightness. Everyone he interacted with, everyone he knew on this ship, raised an eyebrow to me for a fraction of a second but then accepted me with no further hesitation at all.

"You look beautiful," he whispered it in my left ear, effortlessly, like it was built in him to do so, and from his blessed mouth I believed it. I'd braided my hair loosely to one side, tendrils wild in front, taken great satisfaction this evening in dressing with absolutely no fanfare in a frock the color of slate, a simple one with clean lines and just a soft band across the chest. No buttons. No beads. I'm shocked Ruth had ever purchased the thing.

Fabri came around with lagers as black as night, topped with rims of creamy foam, and I put back half of a pint before I thought of anything else, one hand on the glass and one hand on Jack's back. As if we could slide this easily into being together, a couple, one another's intended (be still my heart), whatever way we might be defined. We had spoken of no definitions. No definitives at all.

Fabri didn't move. He examined me, though gently so. "Rosa," is how he speaks my name now and I looked at him over the rim of the glass, hesitant to show all my joy at once. He nodded but his smile was muted. I began to feel it, really, for the first time, the weight of how my decisions would affect not just myself but so many others. Fabrizio, who had planned to travel with Jack, two men free and unencumbered; they'd won the tickets together, they'd admired one another enough to take such a dramatic leap as a unit. I was, at least in part, creating a chasm in their imagined future.

"Hi, Fabrizio….and thank you for this, it's much needed." I motioned with my eyes to the beer and took another long sip. Jack watched us. That look he has when nothing on his face moves save for his eyes. Perhaps he was thinking of all the same things. Perhaps he was thinking about waiting to hear from Molly about the quarantine process. She was hopeful she could pull some strings for Jack and for Fabri, so that they could bypass the trip to Ellis Island when we sailed into New York the next day. For it would be the next day. Both Captain Smith's and Bruce Ismay's jubilant announcements had reverberated through the entire ship since about four this afternoon. It might be into the evening tomorrow, but it would be. Jack held little hope, though, as he and Fabri had no papers, no documentation at all; the tickets they'd boarded with had not even been in their names, so there'd almost undoubtedly be questions upon docking.

Jack had made it clear to me this morning, with the softest but the surest of voices, that he didn't want to leave Fabri behind onboard, that he'd only disembark with me if Fabri was allowed along then as well. He worried about disappointing me, I think, but I loved him for it, for the loyalty and the integrity that wouldn't waver even though his circumstances had changed. I'd kissed his face, both golden cheeks, then the bridge of his nose, over and over again, told him that of course it would be okay no matter what. That I would wait.

I'd wait a thousand years.

As I danced with him this night, this second night of revelry in such a warm and vibrant place, it was all a bit slower in tone and I would be lying if I said we didn't begin already to feel the gravity of what was to come. But there was no less joy. We held on to one another still as if the other might be stolen in an instant, a brand new habit that would die hard now simply for how it was borne. Our bodies, covered in sweat, pushed against one another chest to chest; the alcohol filled my blood and made me beautifully bendable and the band played things so much more subdued than before but also sweeter. When Jack gasped at the beginning of a certain song, then, I knew nothing of why. He pressed in even closer and lined his lips along an earlobe, made the whole of my neck and all of my back light up like I'd developed a sudden fever. Body temperature completely off-kilter, I sighed into it, let it all happen. And when he began to sing I felt tears threatening at the corner of my eyes, hot.

"Since we've met, faith, I've known no repose," good God, was all I could think. Good God.

"She is dearer by far than the world's brightest star." His voice. Barely above a whisper. Gruff.

And I turned my face upward then, amazed by the words he knew, wanting desperately to tell him that I loved him, but he laid a forefinger along my lips and a shiver ran the length of my spinal column. It wasn't over.

"And I call her my wild Irish Rose." That part he spoke, throaty, lost the thread of the melody but looked right into me as he said it. "Written...ten, fifteen, years ago, I think. I heard it here a few nights ago and then I met you. My mother used to sing it, is the thing. She'd get sheet music from the general store, anything, everything." He smiled and I felt my eyes widen further in wonder.

"Jack, I…" His finger remained on my lips and I kissed it like a whisper. Barely. And his gaze changed. Got cloudier, something stirring.

"Rose, come outside with me, I have to show you something." His smile, more rambunctious, perhaps a little nervous, and I was much too worked up to parse any of it out. He took my hand quickly and led me through the thinning crowd; it was getting late, children were asleep on parents' shoulders, empty glasses littered tables in sloppy clusters. The air felt stale. I knew Molly would expect me back soon. I followed him with fervor in my step, though, willing to break any rule with him, push any border with him.

We burst out into the night air and it was colder than it had been on the entire journey, I could tell, just by the wind whipping at my hair as soon as we stepped on deck. All that cut through the ink-black sky was the moon, full and as silver as a Roman coin.

"No stars tonight."

My voice sounded foreign, ethereal. But before I could say anything else he glanced around us wildly, a full circumference, and leaned in, his mouth on me before even his hands were; I felt so wonderfully deranged by the power behind it, by the fitful way his tongue demanded entry and met mine in battle. He'd let this kind of hunger show only once before (in the boiler room), his cumulative patience a testament to his deference to me, his respect. But I realized, on this freezing deck, that we were in a free-for-all. He trusted me now with all of his want, all of his need, all of it that lay in him as a man. A spasm ran down both my thighs, lines of pleasure so intense they translated in my brain almost as pain, and I was scared to death. Of the raw edges. We fell back against the wall, not far from the doorframe where we'd emerged.

For the second time in a day I chose to walk into the fire of something rather than turn from it, and the rewards were ample. My brain was on fire. My body was unequivocally on fire. I pulled his mouth over and down, clamped it on my neck and whimpered as he nipped at it then opened his mouth upon it, ran his tongue and his teeth up and down the length of it and nothing in my entire life has ever felt as concentrated, as focused, as the blaze on those inches of skin did. The heat of Jack against the freezing North Atlantic air, against every dark thing that lurked beyond us, it was intoxicating.

"I can't wait to be alone with you again," he spoke low, hoarse still, moved a hand to my waist and brushed it upward, upward without any pause this time to my breasts and they ached for him. He gasped, at the hardness of my nipples, at how I breathed raggedly into him, at how I thrust against him without any modesty, I'm not sure which (or perhaps it was all), but I reveled at being the source of his undoing. One more kiss at my throat (I swear, right where my pulse was). "I need you Rose, it's...fuck." He couldn't finish a thought. "I'm a mess, aren't I?"

He was, I was, we were depraved.

I groaned at it, at the thought, saw us in my mind in a million places in a million compromising positions and I lost control of any senses. I pulled him closer, put my right hand to his right thigh and clutched at him in a way that could not be misconstrued. It was obvious that I wanted him, that I wanted him on me and inside me again, and as our lips met I begged him to come back with me to Molly's, even though I knew it would never work.

"Tomorrow, with any luck," and he pushed his thumb hard against my lower lip; it felt swollen, my lip, from the kisses, from all the blood flowing. I nodded, closed my eyes. It had been easy to forget that what we were choosing was in service of this too: the physical part, the chasing of this euphoria that has everything to do with our eager bodies, that this was part of the why. And because I was raised in the manner that I was, it is a miracle that I understand such a thing, that I accept such a thing for myself.

I am not ashamed. Somehow, I am not ashamed.

"What did you want to show me, anyway?" I laughed and opened my eyes to see the sapphire of his close up, widened. He sighed and leaned back, put his hands briefly in his pockets against the cold and motioned up to the sky. I teased. "Or that was just some strategy in order to seduce me?"

"The sky, I guess, is what I would have said," he chuckled, turning to search for stars but there were none, truly; I thought about a dark blanket of clouds, how it would feel to sleep on. "I just had to get out of there, breathe with you, be with you." He grabbed my hand and took me to the railing and it was not, after all, that long since he told me about his father and shooting stars and I had wondered about wishes. "Are you cold?"

I nodded and he pushed me forward to face the water, the infinite, came behind me and wrapped his arms around me completely. It was a blanket of Jack, of his strength but also his essence, and I luxuriated in it. He smelled like the malt of lager and the salt of the sea and I will never, as long as I live, forget that scent, for what came next. He had to know.

"You know I love you, Jack."

I held my breath. This felt sacred.

"You know that, right?" I asked for it this time.

He kissed the nape of my neck in response, just once, and I heard the water lapping below as if it knew me, as if it knew my precious torment as I waited.

Another kiss. And then his voice against my prickled skin there, still low but soaked in conviction: "Of course I do. I love you. A lot of this is new to me, but I know that."

He said one more thing, released it to the wind, I might have missed it:

"Wild Rose."

Thank you for reading. Even those of you who read anonymously, silently, it still means the world! What can I say? As is the same for many of us here, I'm sure, writing fanfic is a cozy and dependable thing that helps ground me, picks me up when I'm feeling down. Cheesy but true, all of it. What a joyful thing.

More to come soon!

xxRGD