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!
Chapter One: Not Yet, But Soon
April 14, 1912
I've craved one very particular feeling since I was twelve years old. And several times a day I am overcome with the sensation of being on some sort of precipice where I can almost smell or taste or hear what it felt like to be happy as a child. Before the glaze of my privilege revealed its toxicity. Before my mother revealed hers.
It's a temperature. It's a scent like smoke in trees or, simply, the thrill of night air. It's origins? A late autumn party near Lake Michigan, at a house built in 1840 by my mother's family (for back then the lot of them still swam in railroad money). I stood out on the white wraparound porch, this massive thing, probably twelve hundred square feet of tiled porch, wearing nothing but a pleated chiffon dress the color of French mustard. The adults huddled inside with Scotch and little finger foods on trays but I stood there and I felt the wind off the water and the air was promising, like the chill of the holidays would come soon and make the world a fairy land. Before the snow. Gaslights blinked out in the distance from docks and I'd just read a book about a far off land that you crawled to through a secret cave on the side of a cliff. My father was alive and I saw him inside by a fire, peppered beard and oh how his whole face moved with laughter.
Incessantly I've chased how it felt in that instant, safe (still, then, such a young girl) but simultaneously on the edge of adventure. Since Cal I've craved it more and then tears leak like acid from the sides of my eyes late at night. Burning. But I catch the feeling in a perfume sometimes, a painting, or how music often hits me and makes me daydream, in the taste of the flaky crust of a pastry, inside such ephemeral moments but never….never could I have imagined I'd have it back for longer than a few seconds. Not like this. Certainly not so real that I could taste it again like some forbidden fruit. Bite into it and taste it, juices running metaphorically down my chin and then my neck.
Jack Dawson, dripping from me, all over me.
The door wouldn't even shut properly. I didn't care. He didn't care. All other sounds in the world were now a far-off set of drums. My hand in his and our arms long like he might spin me around. I could breathe in all of him and all of it. That feeling. His laughter, like a meal in itself, and now with every beat of it I could also feel him still between my legs; it was an all-encompassing experience, then, to think of him while with him. To miss him even though he hadn't gone anywhere. A man. This man. How ridiculous that I'd been engaged for three months but never known what a man could be until three days ago. And as we reconvened in front of one another, as we closed the space again, I realized that I might have just unlocked the miraculous secret in finding a lover. That it isn't just the act but also the memory of the act right away, the rolling around in it, the simultaneously secret and shameless review in one's head. I wanted to own it all and felt so in the stretch of my smile.
"Did you see…." No control of the laughter. He had none either. "Did you see those guys' faces? Did you see…"
I placed fingers at his lips then, perhaps the most tender of intimacies tied up in a tiny motion. My hands so recently on him, his on me. But this was forward-facing. This was choosing. His lips were soft and pliable and the bottom one is wider than the top, something I'd spent forty-five minutes in my bed contemplating earlier this morning. How can you memorize a face this quickly?
"When the ship docks." Give it all up, I thought, and bite in. "I'm getting off with you."
The wind seemed suddenly to burn his skin and he appeared nothing less than awestruck. Perhaps it was too much for me to say tonight but when he'd brought his mouth to my ear in the Renault and breathed out the word "love," ragged and on its own, I'd just assumed all bets were off. I knew nothing of his plans save for his lusting after the California coastline. But I would go anywhere. He could be a place, just him, geography be damned. Just the way his skin smelled or his mouth tasted or how he looked at me, devouring, I could live off these things alone.
"This is crazy," he exhaled with the words and it was a relief to see the wonder in his eyes, miraculously this night the color of the Kanmara blue hydrangeas that grow just outside my bedroom window in Pennsylvania.
Everything else we could figure out, as long as we worked it out in wonder.
"I know," and I did. My life would have to be scrubbed off, and violently so. No one, nothing of it would go quietly. Jack had come to me in the gym with those words, "I'm not an idiot," and neither was I, of course; we might be rather young but we knew how the world worked, and him even far more so than I. The blood in my chest burned and bubbled but the adrenaline pushed me forward. "That's why I trust it."
And then my mouth was on his again and I stole a glance just before I lost myself. His eyes closed as he began to kiss me and I thought to myself, "this man is losing himself in kissing me," and that was enough to warm my whole body again, for a heightened pulse to radiate in my wrists and along my inner thighs.
May it just be, I thought. Maybe it could just be, out there in the world as we had been on this ship; perhaps this newfound confidence in me would shelter us both, though I got the sense that Jack needed very little from others and would choose to be with only those he wanted. It was as if his tenacity had seeped into my soul. Ignited something.
I kissed him more, more, more, and the past hours exploded in my head like a set of moving pictures; I'd only been to the cinema once so I had little to go off but that's how it felt and looked, as if it was all projected from reels onto a canvas. The story they told was so much about the flesh, wasn't it, but with an earnestness that was, impossibly, infused with a blissful innocence. I felt inside my own body again tonight. So recently I was willing to discard it, into the cold water, into so many types of death, but tonight I was resurrected in its stripping down. Everything Cal wanted from me, it was mine to give, and I gave it to Jack instead, but more than that, I think, I connected with the depths of what I wanted. I hadn't given serious thought to what I wanted in months, maybe years. I might as well have become mute for how I'd slept-walked through the European sojourn, through the whole damn engagement.
"You must be freezing," he whispered it against my lips and I felt him fumbling to shake the wool coat from his shoulders. I took it, gladly, shivered as he wrapped me in it. The sweat sheen on my skin had been balmy inside but out here, in only the wisp of a dress, was almost unbearable. It wasn't lost on me that it was a moment I'd lived with Cal just two nights prior, when he'd wrapped the blanket around me on deck and I looked back at Jack as I was led away, thinking all the while that I just wanted to stay and sit beside him and talk to him, touch his knee, his torso, anything.
"Thank you," and I gazed up at him, smiled but his attention was very suddenly elsewhere.
"Good God, Rose, look." I followed his line of vision, and a solid wall of ice some eighty feet above the railing was passing by so close that goosebumps ran the length of my forearms, for that's how much I could imagine the devilish cold of the thing. So close I thought shavings would fall upon us, bits or crags of it, but none did. An iceberg that blocked the stars, blocked the leather-black of the sky, emanated its own white light. "Shit." His mouth stayed agape and I watched it, then him, then it again as the ship blissfully and finally left it behind. I stepped closer to Jack but the unbridled joy seemed interrupted now.
"Did we hit it, do you think?" My voice, small now.
He said nothing in response but rushed to the railing, leaned over, and I stood rooted for a few seconds before joining him. Mind racing, legs numb, everything suddenly too much to process. When he felt my presence he turned and he looked worried, a little at least, which is an emotion I had yet to see cross his face at all. In fact, I think up to that moment I had viewed him as someone somehow incapable of fear. How ludicrous, of course. We are all made of it. "Can you see anything?" My voice remained a whisper.
"I think we're okay," he stretched his neck down and over again as far as he could, sizing up the length of the ship, this thing we floated upon, this massive, groaning thing that we trusted with our lives and here it had brushed up against something even mightier, mighty enough to take us all down. I didn't know much about ships but I knew that much. Captain Smith's words from this afternoon echoed in my head. Quite normal for this time of year, the ice. But was that sliver of space between us and it normal? It had been only inches.
The wind blew my hair and we stayed silent, watched as several people peered, scowling, down from a deck above. Silence, just this pregnant silence and I wondered if this was when the spell would break and there might be some kind of wound waiting in its place.
Jack sighed, still leaning, and he sized me up. So blatantly. His twinkling eyes roved from the crown of my head to my shaking ankles and I felt absolutely naked again, so aware suddenly of how bare I'd been for him. My cheeks heated, felt crimson (if a color can indeed be felt). I held my breath but then he smiled, ear to ear, that same smile that had assaulted all my senses on our walk in the sunshine and salted air the day before.
It was heady, how much he'd emboldened in me. How when I held his body on mine in that car I felt as if I held the whole world.
"What?" I let out a long breath from my mouth.
His eyes, those eyes! "I'm sure it's fine, I don't see anything." He bit his lip as if contemplating something entirely different. "I guess I was thinking that I can't believe it was only two nights ago that we were down there, on the stern."
"It feels like a hundred years ago," I nodded and ducked in closer to him, felt one of his arms find my waist again in equilibrium, the other fishing deep inside a pocket of the coat I now wore. He managed to find and light a cigarette with just the one free hand, a feat which made me quietly giggle, and we stood huddled. I knew he was waiting for me to say more. The iceberg had sobered us. The silent threat had sobered us and now I was thinking of things such as the time and the temperature and whether or not Spicer Lovejoy had seventeen stewards on the hunt for me. Whether Cal might actually just appear around a corner, livid, violent.
Jack smelled like the steam from the coal rooms and how our bodies had melded, how our sweat had. Instinctively I knew moving forward that this smell would be the new feeling. My new autumn night. But I hoped I wouldn't have to chase some fleeting incarnation of it.
"I feel like such a different person, Jack, I feel completely different. It doesn't make sense on paper but it does to me. I was…" Another shiver. I pushed into him and kissed the hard line of collarbone through his shirt, reveled in the unbelievable familiarity borne between us. "I suppose I was asleep before." He pulled me tight with his free arm, brought a drag of his cigarette to my lips with the other. The tobacco was cheap, it burned my lungs but it deposited a shot of adrenaline straight to my chest. "I know you probably have a lot of questions."
"I have a helluva lot, that's for sure." He chuckled and I wasn't nervous with him. It hadn't been a lie, in the Renault. I expected to be nervous in all of this but I wasn't. For the past few years I'd wondered what it would feel like, I'd jolted at the notion of going to bed with a man, lost as I was between some romantic notion from a Gothic novel and the stark examples of somber, lovedumb husbands I observed and danced around in Main Line life. Jack was the best parts of the former and nothing of the latter, at least that I could see. "But maybe the most important one is what you expect us to do tonight...now that there's a very good chance Cal has looked in his safe and busted all the veins in his forehead."
In reply I simply burst out in laughter and he did as well. It was so cold now that our exhalations traveled in puffs out, out from our mouths and seemingly straight into the stars above. A couple that had wandered down from the Boat Deck turned and took us in with a critical eye, drank us in and I don't blame them, for how windswept and disheveled we must have looked. The scandal was written on us like the headline on a newspaper, blotches and dark ink. Like grease on a pan. We were stained. I loved it.
I recognized the woman, the film actress Dorothy Gibson, who had been fairly sought after during this voyage by the drooling-est among the first-class men, slack-jawed and silly in her presence. From what I could tell she'd given only one of them the time of day, a stockbroker named William Sloper who by all accounts had actually boarded Titanic with the intention of woo-ing Mark Fortune's daughter Alice. Funny how these things happen, I thought, laughed again as Jack grabbed my hand and compelled me to walk, and I had absolutely no leg to stand on in judgment.
"It is funny, isn't it, Jack," I couldn't catch my breath, "but also terrifying." I stopped and I stopped him then, brought him right in front of me like some centrifugal force. I thought of my mother and how scared she was of Jack, how she'd cringe and vomit and faint if she knew what we'd done. I thought of Cal and spitting in his face, perhaps, taking every bit of me that had endured his veiled abuse for the past months to hurl in his face. "Jack, I meant it." I swallowed. His face was eerily blank, for a few seconds so void of anything and perhaps this was the first moment I was scared. To wear it all on my thin sleeve, so to speak. To not hide behind the refined sarcasm that has become, since my father's sudden death, like a second skin.
Biting down, biting down, waiting.
"Rose, I have nothing." His mouth sighed but his eyes sang and I could see the war within him. In just seconds I saw the amalgam of him, the beautiful battlefield of him, this person so far from home and so road-weary but glad for it. The shape of his head. His hair, locks falling across his forehead but near the nape of his neck it was freshly shaped, clean lines. Who had cut his hair, I wondered. And where had he been a week ago, who had he been with? A month ago? I wanted to know but none of the answers would change my mind. He squeezed both my hands. "When I say nothing, I mean, nothing. No money, no real plan yet, my hands are empty." He bit his bottom lip, then licked it. "Rose."
He was giving me a way out. I didn't want it.
"I don't care." I dropped his hand but brought one of mine to his right cheek. God I love touching him. Any part of him. "I won't have anything after we get off this ship either, Jack. My mom will disown me, everything will be gone." He leaned into my hand, then kissed the palm, which told me everything I needed to know in an instant. The way he sighed tonight, each time, it was like he was giving in joyfully but cautiously to something inevitable.
I feast on books, I see life in them and through them, and so these moments with him, they were so lush and ripe to my mind's eye. Literature is the meat on my bones and in that moment I felt I'd actually become part of a canon I'd spent my childhood worshipping. This moment you could slice through. His cards on the table and I would reach down to grab them. Each one. Here was my Laurie and my Professor Bhaer in just one soul, in just one experience.
"We'll make it work, we'll figure it out then," he spoke with a renewed conviction and his hands laid over mine, his face underneath both sets of our hands like a portrait we framed together and I knew it would be impossible to convey to him tonight how grateful I was that he came into my life. So instead I just kissed him for the seven thousandth time, swept my tongue across his bottom lip first, which is something he'd done an hour ago and I wanted to mimic, to absorb everything he has shown me and give it back to him tenfold. And when he groaned into my mouth, I felt it inside my belly and I knew it must be working, this way I wanted to please him too.
There was no moon visible tonight so we were aided by the darkness, further by a dark corner. It was feverish but meditative, one of his thumbs up and down on the column of my neck and I thought to myself, "I will never, ever get enough of this."
So we didn't hear the footsteps until they were upon us. Until I could smell the white musk and bergamot of Lovejoy's cologne, an acrid scent which I unfortunately would know anywhere. I have no idea what we thought we'd do in the coming hours, in the before of it all. Whether we would have slunk down to the deck itself and clung to one another until daybreak. I couldn't go below decks with him; he had roommates, and besides, stewards guarded the staircases to the mens' third class quarters in the evenings, in a show of protection for the families and women traveling alone. Just by being male, just by being poor, Jack was categorised on this ship, of course, unfairly marked from the moment he leaped aboard.
Our mouths broke from one another and I could barely gauge Jack's reaction in the dark.
"There you are," his voice deceptively silken in its camouflaging of malice, "we've been looking all over this ship for you, miss."
Author's Note:
Hey guys! I've been toying with the idea of a "Titanic doesn't sink" take for some time but shied away out of fear I wouldn't do the characters justice; writing Jack and Rose ON the ship just feels like a different beast. Life is hectic right now, so this story will consist of shorter chapters than are typical for me. And it may not be as polished as Exile was, but I promise my heart is in it! I'm really trying to experiment with tone in this story. I feel as though my tales have had a somber bent at times. Ultimately I want this one to be about the sheer joy of the iceberg-miss.
Feedback welcome and thanks so much for reading!
xxRGD
