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 Two: Balance Yourself
April 15, 1912
5:30 a.m.
I imagined we must have been south of Halifax by now, the coast of Canada hovering but really still so far. That last gasp of a vast oceanic night reflecting sky on water and then vice versa, how the lapping looked silver even when no moon was visible. There was talk we'd sneak into New York Harbor under the cover of night, tomorrow evening, almost a full day before we were due.
No natural light in my room, where I was buried. It could be any time, really. I could be inside any world, if I lay only in the dark. But I kept the little lamp by the clock on, soft white glow like ethereal eggshell. A guidepost to nothing. It threw speckled shadows on the wall and I tried to reach out and grab them, my brain caught between mania (a faithful bedmate) and hope. I turned over and over no fewer than eighty times, huffing out the agitation to no one, body shaking and empty and aching from the center. Every cliche. I wondered what it would have felt like to lay with him tonight. Lay with him without the chase. After the chase. But I left the damned lamp on so that I could watch each second tick by, then each hour, every bit of time that had passed in this world between grasping him and turning from him. To punish myself.
And he'd never even been in this room. Drew me, kissed me into delirium, but never set foot in here.
I should have grabbed him. We should have run.
The lamp's shadows became words and I imagined the entire ship was not real but simply allegory instead, just pages and pages of it and we could all contribute to the ending, some better ending in which we were all better people, if we woke up. Really woke up.
Since I was thirteen, I'd say, I've been aware of the fine line I straddle. The width of a hair, this space between the aversion to my privilege and the charade of it.
Ruth pulled me from school two weeks before the autumn term ended. We had history exams coming up (though, really, the exams were a farce for the vast majority of us). I'd written an essay about industry and the need for humanitarianism in the American South, an invigorating experience unfortunately capped off by an intense meeting with a teacher who took issue with my profiling black laborers as, still, slaves in every way but by name. Eventually she cowered a bit at my resolve, all barely-seventeen years of me then and my shoulders shaking down to the bones and my bohemian hair still down most of the time but I wouldn't get away with that for much longer.
It is because of this, the unfulfilled promise of my love of a thing, of the uncovering, that when I am upset I run narratives through my head. Settlers cowering next to mud walls at Roanoke. Cities on hills and destruction at the feet of them. Displaced peoples across prairies and I wished I could ride along with them. My dad loved it. Kept piles of musty books by his bed and whichever one ended up on top became ringed with chamomile tea stains. I can still imagine his mark, a very particular type of mark he left on a room.
The day after he died I laid out all the essays he'd ever written on the tile floor of our kitchen. Unfulfilled promises. Some of them bordered on activism. Scraps, starts of things. He wrote them at a desk by a window lined with jade green bottles that once belonged to his grandmother. "It's something about the way the light hits them, Rose, darling, you know," and a drag from a smuggled cigarette left his lips (my mother has always found smoking a bankrupt affair). But he never had time to really pursue it. The family money dwindled. He hadn't inherited his father's, nor certainly his grandfather's, acumen.
Everything seemed to lead here. Everything good in my life has either gone or become some sort of almost and I cannot take it anymore. No more.
"Rose, what on Earth have you done?" Ruth's voice was a frantic whisper and her face that of a ferret's. She looked at our hands clasped, something Lovejoy could not have prevented had he tried. I would march back here, sure, because back here I would eventually have had to come anyway, but I would not remove myself from Jack. And the confidence he possessed, it was dynamic, the way he walked into that room having just cuckolded a man who owned seven steel mills, three hotels, and twelve pistols.
Except that I did remove myself from him.
I sat up and ran my hands down the length of my torso. Naked under the thin cotton of a nightgown the color of sea foam, all of me felt tender and I traced up and down until I found the tiny spot on the upper right side of my ribs, maybe the size of a dime, where I relished in the soreness of an impending bruise. I hoped it would turn blue, then a violent purple. Perhaps it would take weeks to heal. Jack's elbow caught there, in the car, as he shifted up to remove the coat.
The coat.
"Property of A. L. Ryerson." The steward sighed as he read from the tag and I could smell mint and chewing tobacco on his breath. He looked conflicted. Deep down he hadn't wanted to find anything that implicated Jack. None of them had. For Cal had torn the coat from me in a motion that accosted even the subordinate nature of ship staff; my body had lurched, Jack reached for a forearm to steady me, his face red and on fire and mouth preparing eight hundred words but emitting none of them. Eight hundred false starts. Jack is self-assured, yes, but he knew any motion, any retaliation, would have to be perfect, impenetrable in this situation.
Everyone else in the room was trained down to their ligaments to follow a man like Cal to the ends of the Earth. My mother stood like a deer who can't find a tree to hide behind but stands in paralysis before some sort of light or spectacle. Two stewards. The Master at Arms. Lovejoy. And the two of us, poised against them all.
"Oh well, then, you see, we don't require much Sherlock-ing after all," Cal shot a look at Lovejoy that I didn't dare feign to understand.
But a worm entered my ear I suppose, some twisted little poisonous thing, and it burrowed quickly and worked its way right over into the folds of my brain. My hand dropped from Jack's (electric, even in this distress) and his eyes flitted to mine as if he knew, in that instant, that the spell broke. Mr. Ryerson. Sad, hunched, mourning the loss of his son to a motorcar accident back in America, on some sort of watery march toward a funeral, and his wife was so distraught she hadn't even left their cabin. Other children of theirs too, barely seen on the decks and never at dinner; Ismay and private stewards saw to their every need instead. If Jack had his coat, if it was the coat we'd been wearing all night, that we'd strung over ourselves when the aftermath of so much sweat made a cramped and stirred-up space suddenly very cold…
"Rose, I just borrowed it, earlier today, I was going to return it," Jack's eyes pleaded with mine. It stung, to see him unsure and scared and not just because this whole situation felt horrid but because now we were connected, weren't we, by those raw, damp moments just an hour prior; good God, I could still feel his mouth on my skin.
By the moment I told him I would go with him.
There was a split second of visible hesitation before the Master at Arms' warm face dissolved into the burden of obligation. Duty. Whatever one might call it. He didn't want to take Jack in, he hadn't wanted a part of any of this (for how obvious it was to an innocent observer that this was strictly a domestic drama), but now he must. I looked away long enough for the cuffs to come out and my mother used that window of time, a tiny sliver, to slink by my side, her dripping, sweating drink still in one hand and now her other along my spinal column. Just resting. Threatening. Her muted threats? The same as ever but Cal's wouldn't be.
Cal had looked like a madman last night, cheeks bulbous and red with a rage just barely contained inside his sense of propriety. Wild eyes, traveling from Jack, to me, back to Jack. He'd seen the drawing, of course, and Lord I'd wanted him to. Call me ill, call me anything, but I wanted it all opened up like wounds. For him to imagine not only my body decidedly not his but also alongside someone else's. I hoped his imagination could conjure it, Jack on top of me. The way his tongue had dipped inside my belly button and I arched upward and seemingly outward from my own form.
"Rose."
I looked down, down still. If I looked at him I'd crumble. I was close to crumbling either way.
"Rose, you know me, you know I'm telling the truth." Pleaded for me to look up and I could feel the hot tears in both our eyes somehow. I closed mine.
"So we have an honest thief here then, do we?" Cal circled like a crow. "An honest thief!" He stopped between us. I could smell him, the heat of Cal and the musk of his cigars and the eucalyptus of his soap which seemed outrun by perspiration at this juncture. He must have been right in Jack's face. "I have to be honest with you, son, I was missing two things very dear to me this evening. When one arrived back I had a pretty good feeling I'd know where to find the other. Alas, I was wrong." He cleared his throat and the room was silent save for Jack's grunt in response. "But I wasn't wrong about your true nature, was I?" Cal turned suddenly to me, placed a forefinger under my chin and forced my head up and my whole awareness back. I recoiled, opened my eyes but recoiled and I saw Jack's heart break all the same. Cal's breath on my forehead. "A vagabond, a thief, what else, Rose?" He lowered his voice and the whole room dissolved, it seemed, as he aimed his words at me as if a knife into my mouth, my throat. "An unreliable narrator? A lover, perhaps? A liar?"
Cal turned suddenly back to everyone else.
"Take him, take him, I suppose poor Mr. Ryerson will press the charges."
"Real slick, Cal, all of this," Jack looked scared but he never faltered, not really. He turned to me once more, tried once more but I felt faint. "Rose, let me explain, let me…Rose, you know me."
Ruth stayed in the room, after they took Jack. I will not give her credit for much but I will give her credit for that. She knew what Cal was capable of and she knew that her presence would muffle his fury. This initial fury. We didn't speak, except for when I asked her to pour me a shot of expensive Brandy from the gold-leafed bar cart. The room dwindled to the three of us. My ears stopped up from the anxiety. I felt as if I was underwater.
"The original three," that's what I said, and laughed maniacally because I was delirious and sad and stuck. Stuck now between my idolatry of Jack and the reality of what I knew, the reality of how I'd blown up my entire life. I'd known since the moment Jack kissed me that I wouldn't walk forward into the things I was supposed to anymore. By the time I took that robe off in front of him I knew I wouldn't marry Cal. By the time his body entered mine in the car I knew I would have a life, now, that I never, ever imagined I'd be brave enough to pursue.
"That is a little slut, isn't it." That's all he could manage in a hot whisper, Cal, on the way to his room and aware that Ruth would wait him out for hours. After all, she'd had to before. His access to me, this night, was over. Tomorrow was fair play. Fair game. Ruth would let him have me in the light of day.
I looked into him, not away, and brought the small glass to my lips, felt the alcohol burn down the back of my tongue, then my throat, all at once.
He turned and fumbled for a lighter in his pocket as he left. And that's when I saw it. The glint of the necklace as it bounced also from his pocket. Naked, away from its case, it looks like an absolute toy.
I stumbled to my bedroom, ripped the dress off but washed nothing of Jack off. I smelled like him now. The night we danced in the Third Class common room, that's when our scents had first mixed. When he'd walked in front of me to grab our beers, that's when I took everything of him in: the dampness of his shirt, the Ivory bar soap, the way cigarette smoke clung to his hair. Before Jack I never wanted to know these things. Taste someone. Smell someone. To me he was the Earth.
I must have slept for an hour, maybe a tad more, and I dreamt of him leaving the ship in chains. And when I awoke it seemed the most obvious thing in the world, what Cal had done to drive a wedge. The necklace, in his pocket because he'd wanted to plant it somehow on Jack. And the discovery of the coat, a red herring when all was said and done because there had to be some innocence tied up in Jack's possession of it. There had to be, dammit.
"We should move, Rose, I'm sure someone will come down here…" But he didn't move, not yet, and so I kept threading my fingers through his hair like it was some ritual I'd been a part of my entire life. The weight of him on me, like a balm to anything and everything. I shifted my thighs, just an inch, and their slickness slid against his. Center to center. My heart skipped a beat because what we'd just done came back in waves.
"Do you think we can move?" I kissed the side of his forehead again. Golden skin. He is golden. "I don't think my limbs work, Jack." And he laughed beneath me, gentle but affirming and the lightness returned to us.
"We'll get there."
I tried to picture him below decks. Some confined holding space where they'd asked him to fold his long limbs in for now, to rest somehow in the anxiety of having been labeled a criminal on board a floating palace. It hurt too much so I attempted to insert myself in the scene, a valiant rescue. Kisses on his face, cheeks first but then I wouldn't be able to stay away from his mouth.
Would he forgive me, I wondered, for the lapse? The profession of our love, this brand new infant of a love, so fresh and I'd abandoned it in a solitary moment of doubt. He deserved better.
Two nights ago he'd told me about his childhood underneath the stars in Wisconsin and how as far back as he could remember his father, who read slowly and deliberately because he'd learned to read just a few years before Jack was even born, read out loud passages from nature writers like John Muir. Descriptions of California, of a "baptism by mountain," and they'd talk about going together one day. Hiking the Sierras perhaps. Jack Dawson was just a few years into living out all his parents' dreams. And if he'd still have me, I wanted to be even just a small part of it.
To finish the work and start more. I had a fair amount of that to do as well.
Two hours later I'd formulated a basic plan. After I'd pulled on a pale-blue day dress, buttoned down the side so that even with shaking hands and a sore torso I could manage on my own, I made just one stop in the room before I slipped away directly to the hallway: my jewelry box, where I grabbed the two jade rings my father had given me years before. I had to have insurance now. There was no going anywhere without it anymore.
Author's Note: sorry for the delay in posting! Moving forward, I'm hoping for just a week between. I'm so used to writing those 8,000-word beasts of parts/chapters, it's actually quite fun to work on some shorter and faster-paced pieces. I have a vision of Jack and Rose getting off the ship here but I have no idea yet where this story will take me/them from there. I'm just sort of along for the ride as inspiration strikes me.
Cheers xx RGD