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 7: Ship Ahoy

"Good God, are you kidding me, the entire thing? All to yourself?" He laughed and squinted just his left eye at the sun; it was huge as even half an orb, showing off at the end of the day, all ambers and golds over the water, so bright I was almost convinced it would refuse to set. For the first time in the history of the damned universe, today it would not set and I worshipped the thought! "The entire Louvre, shut down?"

I shook my head in affirmation and my whole body tingled because I could barely believe it had happened. The life I lived, it was gilded and gaudy and at times, incongruously to all its privileges, awful. I regretted so much of it, things I'd had little control over, but I regretted them all the same. I could have done more, I knew, over time, chipped away. Rejected the extravagant spending…the purchase of the seventh dress or the seventh trinket in a week's time, or the way Trudy came at my call any hour of the day to relieve me of constrictive buttons or of simply boredom or sadness. And now Jack Dawson stood before me looking like both a man and an excitable boy all at once and I wanted nothing that had come before. I thought about his town in Wisconsin, how it sounded like a home in rich browns and greens, and unadorned.

Jack Dawson. What a simple name for someone who was anything but. Jack Dawson.

"My whole life should have led up to that moment." I licked my bottom lip. It should have. A childhood steeped in art, wonderfully bathed in it, the way my father admired the men who drew portraits on the corners downtown, looked them in the eye when so many people wouldn't, but also taught me of everyone from Caravaggio to Hunt or Rossetti. The newest books, he'd have them sent in haste from publishers all over the world. But when the doors parted for me and the silence enveloped me and the whole world of it opened up it was with Cal by my side and I felt soured. Grumpy. I missed my father. I missed the blissful innocence, of course. No longer a child but not yet a woman, not that I could fathom. "But it fell flat. Jack, like an insect that just dies on the pavement and you're sad but what else do insects do but die."

I sighed and I looked at him and he looked at me and I felt as though I must make no sense to him. That I was to marry this man with whom I found no joy. Dinner was in...an hour and a half? How would I live in a world now where they both existed...both of these men, both of these possible worlds?

"Lady Lilith." Jack smiled and I could have sworn my heart stopped. "Do you know it? Do you know of her?"

"Do I know her?" I chortled. Can women chortle and retain any grace? I tried to, at that moment. Perhaps part of me wondered how dare he question me on such matters. How dare he know. History, art, these were the sacred things I had to keep me company and make me feel separate from the cavalcade of idiocy around me at all times, but if I protected it, if I served as its gatekeeper, was I any better than those I loathed? I softened again. "Yes. I was just…" I blushed and looked down, played with my hands and ran my right thumb over the ring. It was beautiful. It was poison. "I was just thinking about Rosetti, actually, my dad loved his work."

"You look like her, just like that painting, how it feels, Rose you do," he squinted more, "the power of her, the resistance to being controlled I mean, not the mythic part of her that was more evil, killed youths and all that." He laughed and looked out to sea, paused for the better part of a minute and inside that minute I honestly wondered how it was that I could be here, on the largest ship in the world, sailing to my inherent Main Line doom, but now also in some interim. An interim in which I was being told I looked anything like the Pre-Raphaelite painting that my father had adored so much he'd hung a printed replica like a miniature tapestry above his desk. My father always told me she represented strength, indeed, the strength in femininity.

"Thank you." I nodded, tried to appear nonchalant even though my insides were liquefying, and looked outward as well. We were mirrors, our profiles. "I saw the painting, the real one, I saw her in a house in Philadelphia when I was five, the man who owned it was a business associate of my father's." (For a time anyway, but those were stories better left unshared.)

"And?" He smiled and the crinkles at each side of his mouth are so innocent but they look as if they run deep beneath his skin, harboring tales. "Was she as beautiful in person?" I held my breath, then, as he spoke. "Was she as ethereal, as disaffected, but like she loves being free?"

Inwardly I gasped. For who knew that anything like this feeling existed in the world.

llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

We saw fishing boats in the distance, a cluster of them covered in people waving wildly (for we were, I had forgotten, news of the world) and they surely signaled the return to civilization. Days out on open water, and even with the technological achievement of a ship like this, it was always uneasy, wasn't it, to be that far removed from a comfortable radius to shore? I looked over at Molly and she nodded, grabbed for my elbow and squeezed it too hard. But she meant well and I sent the wince somewhere inside, hid it. Once again I faced a sunset on this goliath but it would be the last. Ironically the first bit of land on the horizon, we'd been told, was the little Long Island inlet town of Southampton. Southampton to Southampton, full circle, except somehow I knew from a long-discarded book of my father's that this one had been founded by whalers and the removal of a native tribe called the Shinnecock. I looked away, for a moment, swallowing a pain in my throat when I realized I was actually a bit scared to see land of any sort. I was scared to know what all this looked like on solid ground, so to speak, and even more so because I would do it (at least at first) without Jack by my side.

Mr. Andrews and Molly had both spent considerable time in the Marconi room during the past twelve hours relaying messages to no avail. I imagine both had taken flack for it. The fanfare that would accompany Titanic's docking made various immigration officials unreachable and so Ellis Island seemed to be Jack's fate, along with Fabri's, along with that of every person in third class; as was custom they would board a ferry after we pulled into Pier 59, all of them invisibly but indelibly marked by the ticket they'd purchased (some of them with life savings). I felt sick to my stomach, but, selfishly, not just because none of them deserved to enter in any way separate from how I would, how Molly would, but also because without Jack next to me all of these decisions seemed so nebulous. And not that I doubted him! It was that I could not touch any of it; the future was suddenly made of empty brackets lingering in some sentence we had just started to write. We were a portrait, interrupted, and the watercolors and the brushes lay in the grass, begging to be picked back up.

"I'm impatient, I'm falling prey to my impatience, Molly," I sighed and leaned back, creating a v shape between myself and the railing. I did not expect to feel this off-kilter as the ocean swelled our welcome. With Jack I'd had only the briefest and most fervent of goodbye-for-nows.

"This isn't what I'd imagined," I whispered it, almost breathless really, into his mouth and felt the metal of the stair railing pressing into my back. He grunted and shifted us both, fearful, I suppose, that we'd fall down this flight of stairs and not live to see what would come. He pressed his lips to mine softer then, a feeling like butter, and my heart calmed for a few seconds.

"I know, Rose, I know," another kiss, this one like a clicking sound, and his voice like honey all over me, "but it'll be alright, I promise." He pulled me to him, placed his chin on my head and tried to cradle all of me against him, under him. In him. I tried to focus on a future, on how it would feel to hold him in a thousand places, how much I wanted to know of him and of how he interacted with the world.

I didn't want to seem weak, not with him, and thankfully the way we felt against one another never tolerated it, somehow. He comforted me, I folded into him, but there was an innate sense that we walked forward on equal footing.

"You jump, I jump, remember?" I let out a pathetic, shriveled laugh as I whispered it into his collarbone and he pulled me tighter. How twisted our little love story so far, I thought, this curious tale woven out of a suicide attempt, a broken engagement, salacious moments stolen at sea; it was fodder for theatrics at some low-rent house far far far from Broadway. It was endlessly romantic but arguably also endlessly terrifying.

"Right." And then he pulled back and cupped my face in his hands, looked at me in disbelief before he kissed me furiously over and over on the mouth in tiny pecks. Can he really not believe any of it either, that we fit together like this? Over the past twenty-four hours I have found my mind wandering a hundred places, wondering how drastically my entering his life has changed how he sees it playing out. His life. His life! This thing that existed completely without me only days ago and could, arguably, go on without me. "Rose," he paused and he stopped kissing and crouched down just a couple of inches so that our faces were perfectly in line, "Are you okay with this? I meant what I said when I came to you, that afternoon," he looked nervous, little beads of sweat near the right side of his forehead, "the most important thing is that you're alright, that you're…" He was at war with himself, again. This thing I'd seen in him. He wanted me but he seemed scared of what my entering his world might mean. I don't blame him. "Rose, I would understand if you needed more time, if you wanted to do this differently."

"No." I shook my head and my cheeks were flames, red from sun on the deck, red from how he made me feel, red from my insistence that we be together as quickly as we could, "Jack, this is what I want. As soon as you get your papers, come to me," I felt even more crimson from these words.

"There's nothing else in the world I would do, Rose, if you'll have me."

I wanted all of him. Every bit.

I felt leaner. My jawline felt sharp. Days prior it had been the stress of the upcoming march back to Philadelphia. Now it was how raw my nerves were, naked nerves flailing everywhere inside my body with nowhere to land. Molly had paraded little cakes in front of me to entice; I loved chocolate so very much that even in the throes of uncertainty I cannot for the life of me reject it. I think in the past two days I've eaten one full meal collectively. Barely. My stomach's contents could not be much more than some sugar and Earl Grey tea, the latter consumed nervously as I'd counted seconds and minutes on the clock in her parlour. But what was I counting down to?

The unknowable.

I had not seen my mother. I had not seen Cal. Molly had shielded me, and heartily so, from the ship's gossip channels; I knew the talk must be potent by now, a beast, but if I did not engage with it perhaps I could escape relatively unscathed. I did pass Helen Churchill Candee in a hallway early this morning and she nodded to me before glancing downward, a silent nod that I dare say conveyed approval. From the woman who ten years ago already penned a book entitled How Women May Earn A Living, I am not shocked by it. There was a twinkle in her eye. There was a twinkle in mine.

I will turn eighteen years old in ten days. I feel every part a woman, now.

We walked off at a brisk pace, into air balmier than we'd felt in days, weeks, months; a bizarre warm front had moved in ahead of us and even in the twilight it was still almost seventy degrees. I heard a man from a nearby pier shout it at us. Maybe it was several men that did, the crowds were thick. Seventy! Shouted as if it were their duty to welcome us back into the fold. But, yes, in sum it was all so quick. Quicker than I had expected, for truly I'd braced myself. The flash of bulbs and the fanfare waited, poised and sparkling, for those who wanted to wade in it, and many, many did. I saw Dorothy Gibson and her mother out in full regalia, for one, fur coats and black hats a mile high, and there were motion picture camera contraptions hoisted by a crane. But if you didn't want any of it, as Molly and I did not, then a gentle slinking down gangways with stewards flanking all sides was an option. This was also made possible by the exorbitant amount of money Molly had offered up to privatize this exit, I was sure of it despite her mentioning nothing of the sort.

"I'm not in the business of creating spectacle," Molly whispered to me as we waited for a black motorcar to stop right before us, "most of the time anyway." I smiled, wistful at her, thankful for her, and glanced back for one more look at the giant, at this ship that had carried me home safely but wrecked my senses. Somewhere on it Jack waited, hands in pockets I'm sure, good-humored as ever I'm sure, but damn it if I didn't hope he was wistful too, aching for me too, empty now without this other presence (mine! mine!) as I was without his. "Two days, Rose, at the most," Molly watched me staring back as we got in the car, which smelled of new leather seating and the driver's clove cigarette, "he'll be through there in two days at the most."

"Will it really be that long, even, you think?" I arranged myself in the seat, ran my fingers down through my hair, which I wore down now all of the time. "Jack said sometimes it's as quick as a couple of questions and right out of the door."

"It's true, I think." She patted my knee. "But it depends on so many things. I doubt it will happen but sometimes they hold people, to make sure they're not sick. Or to…." She sighed and I saw the candor alight in her eyes, "To be honest, Rose, I've volunteered at places like Ellis before and sometimes it's just to do with the holdup of the fact of the prejudice. They could not like the look of someone and delay entrance. But Jack is a charmer." She looked for my reaction like someone might look for candy and she got it, got the flush in my cheeks and how I hungered for even the sound of his name. "And if I know him at all, and decidedly I only know him a little, but it counts...Rose, he'll be out of there in no time and on the way to find us." She took a little butterscotch candy from a dish that lay, inexplicably, in the ashtray of her seat. "To find you, my dear."

We took a side entrance to the Waldorf and were up in a suite in a matter of moments, really, thanks to Molly's great friendship with the Astors.

"I'm so appreciative," I took her hand as she walked me into a bedroom covered with damask wallpaper the color of jade when it sparkles, and I felt dizzy by it, "but Molly, I don't want any special...treatment, I suppose is the word. I'm aware of what I walked away from, and I don't need…" I squeezed her hand. "Molly, is it horrible for you to be helping me?" Searched her eyes. "Will it do you in, to put yourself on the line for me while I wait for him?"

"I'm only who I am and where I am because people put themselves on the line for me," and her conviction was contagious, "so absolutely damned not, Rose! I'm honored to help two people become what they want, on their own terms, for that's what I was allowed to do."

Author's Note: Thanks, as always, for reading, because writing is such a source of joy! This story looks nothing like I imagined it might when I picked the concept. It's so fun to just see where little threads lead in my brain.

More soon-

RGD xxx