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! Also, any mention of a known/real figure or known/real place is also purely for entertainment and is in no way meant to be perceived as part of a historical narrative.

Chapter 10: Up in the Air

April 25, 1912

In Paris, just this past winter, I went to an exhibition of Eugene Atget's photographs. Hazy images from the Rue des Blancs, the Hotel de Lauzun, blurry peeks from the arched doors of brothels. He wasn't there that night, when we drank champagne and stared at his work enlarged as big as picture windows. He never came to the parties with the money, is what we heard. He was known to pop up at galleries with groups of students late into the evening and demand a lowly employee allow him to conduct an impromptu class. He was known to simply wander the streets of old Paris (his disappearing Paris) camera in one hand and a half-eaten apple in another. He took more photographs of door knockers and broken planters than he did people, but his work was extraordinary. Urban architecture as ghastly, as ghosts, buildings from the 16th century to the 19th, many rotting. The man possessed Vieux Paris. And it got me thinking about being newly thirteen and telling my father excitedly, on my birthday that year actually, that I wanted a camera so that I could take photographs of our garden, my bedroom, the stables, and take them with me to school in case we lost the house. We were already, then, in danger of losing the house. That cavernous thing.

Tomorrow would be my birthday, my first ever spent in New York, come again just as it always does. I am so far from where I had been in Paris and even further from where I had ever been with my father.

There was a studio just a half block down from our room at The Boyd, a storefront nestled on the first floor of an old Greek Revival the color of wet sand. Taunting me, exciting me, stirring up that itch to hold a camera. I never really had. We walked by constantly and every time we did I'd sneak a peek at a window display full of used Kodak Brownies and Graflexs; one in particular, just a black folding camera that looked so beautifully utilitarian, caught my eye and I always grabbed Jack's hand and made him pause for a fraction of a second. Saw us in reflection in the glass. Began to think about so many new dreams with him by my side.

"The way you see the world, it would be amazing," he said more than once, looked down at me and kissed the bridge of my nose there in front of the whole world (which was, in our neighborhood, rather risky given that everyone we knew save for Fabri thought Jack was my brother), "to see what you capture with it."

In just a week we'd uncovered the whole world acted out in microcosm in Greenwich Village, sliding into its spaces, gasping at how alive it was. Old money down one avenue. A homeless encampment down the next one over and, along with it, street performers of every variety (even one man who performed as a mime almost completely nude). A fine tea room decked in linen and chandeliers right next door to a coffee shop that, in its stained tables and piles of newspapers and slight smell of musty body odor, screamed Bohemia. Washington Square Books, where we simply got lost inside stacks for hours and no one minded that we couldn't afford yet to buy a damn thing.

Jack was helping to paint, to install lighting, whatever was needed down at Aldo's theater. I call it Aldo's but it was the brainchild of a dozen artists and writers, and even several actors. A playwright in London had provided a seed of an investment but it would be a laborious task to make a mountain from the small bits this group possessed; after living among them for a few days, though, I firmly believed them capable, what with their enviable mix of ambition and flair. Working there didn't pay much but it was something to start with and Jack still had time to draw. I'd been looking for something as well, and Jack didn't hesitate at my wish to work. In fact, truly, I would have to if we had any hope of making it out West by this summer.

What is my life now? I thought this question quite often during a day and little vibrations would fall down my spine like when warm water hits skin, but instead it made me shiver from the thrill.

We'd pawned one ring. Jack insisted, just one. "You should think about it, Rose, don't lose the other just yet, don't lose that whole part of your father," and he pushed the silver one with the emerald stone back into my hand and I felt the pointed weight of it, nodded and looked at him with a fair amount of wonder. He was practical. He was gentle. Compassionate. Not a combination I'd ever expected out of a man. Not anywhere I'd been up to this point. "Rose, I used to get by on dimes." And he took my whole face in his hands, nothing less than cradled it. "We can make this money last."

We. We could make it.

We.

The glint in his eyes told me this was more money than he'd seen in awhile. Thirty-five dollars. I viewed it just as much his as mine; what we'd fought down together, the change we'd seized together, it bound us. It seemed like a lot, at this moment, having started with essentially nothing, having turned down all of Molly's offers of cash. But I'd never really handled money. I'd never been the one paying for things, not inside the physical act of any of it; this made me feel like an imbecile, but I was learning, bit by bit.

We'd walked down to a little bakery called the Mona Lisa on Morton, which smelled always of butter and had little glass bowls of swimming magnolias set out on round tables. After three in the afternoon each day they put out a huge basket of day-old sweet rolls and scones and danishes wrapped individually in paper and they were just a few pennies apiece. We'd done this several times already, bought a couple of them to share then ambled back home (was it home!) slowly, chewing, talking. This time Jack was telling me about his mother, how she used to bake in the afternoons and he'd walk in from school to the smell of sourdough. Berry jams spread haphazardly all over fresh bread from the oven, yeast and fruit and ferment, that's how he remembered the scent of her, the feel of her. When he spoke like this, casually but with such a richness of self-actualization, it was mesmerizing and it, quite frankly, made me want every single part of him. In the middle of this street, I wanted him. The way I knew his body now, how strange it was when we were out and about during the day and it had clothes on it.

Good God, if I ever went back to society I would be ruined. I was ruined. I was a walking scandal.

Such a good thing that I was never, ever going back.

I was blushing. He stopped talking, looked at me strangely, a cock of the head. I was about to brazenly tell him precisely what I'd been thinking, which was that I wanted to stuff my face with the rest of the flaky danish then race him up the steps to our building, run down the hallway, hurry inside our room, take every stitch of anything off of him and taste the apricot and the sugar on his lips, on his fingers. Lick all of it off of him. But I realized, then, that we stood in front of the portrait studio. I stared again, for I seemed to get lost in a fairly thick daydream anytime I got near the place.

"We could go back to the pawn shop, we could find one soon for you." He looked at me, eyes with a question, then back at the display case of tripods and cameras, the ones in this window brand new and shining and seemingly making the buyer a promise of anything. To see the world through a lens. What a new and strange proposition, wasn't it? "Rose, I wish…" Did I miss just being able to have anything I wanted, anytime I wanted it? That was his question, I was certain.

"Eventually." I smiled and shook it off, the whimsy. Not forever, not even for more than a day, just for now; Jack and I had plenty of the new right now already, plenty of adventure and art surrounding us. I'd never been out in the world like this. "Jack, I don't need one right now. It makes no sense. When we get to California, when we've saved up a bit more." He smiled. He loves hearing me mention the future, which in turn makes little butterflies dance inside along my rib cage...goodness, just on my ribs.

"The first photograph we'll take, you know what it has to be?" He began walking again and there was intrigue in his step. I laughed. "Actually I'll have to take it."

"What?" I picked up my pace to stay alongside him, tasting the last bit of pastry in my mouth mixing with the spring air.

"You." He glanced down. "On a horse, right in the surf."

lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

It was as if we turned a switch violently on or violently off the moment we walked into or out of our room.

We suspected that some housemates might know our secret (one had winked, and we'd snickered) but Fabri, himself installed comfortably in a room on the top floor, insisted he'd heard nothing of the sort. The insane thing was, we'd actually stumbled upon a group of people with such liberal and open-hearted ideas about morality that they probably would have allowed us to live openly in their midst just as we were. One woman down the hall in Number 6 worked as an artists' model; in a week I'd seen already three men with canvases in and out at odd hours and no one had said a damn thing. (She was gorgeous, tall and almost like a willow in the silk robe she traipsed about in, but with hair both the color and the nuance of a chestnut.) Had we known that we would enter such a magical space, a place where every single resident seemed at the start or perhaps in the middle of some kind of intellectual or aesthetic journey, we wouldn't have lied. But the thing was done now, and we laughed about it to no end. Crashed into one another the instant the door was shut, lips finding lips faster than ever in the history of humanity, I'd imagine.

Lovers, in this tiny place. The secrecy, I'd be lying if I didn't admit this, it made things even more exciting. To see myself as a lover, particularly when I traveled down the hall to the shared bath in the mornings and occasionally had a moment to myself in front of the mottled mirror, it was invigorating and I was still working to shake off the guilt of it. The guilt of how I sunk into this new life so easily after leaving so much (and so many) behind.

"What would you take photographs of, though, if you had a camera right this minute?" He wouldn't let it go. So gently, but he wouldn't let it go.

The door shut behind us so I pushed into him, kissed a spot in the middle of his chest right through his white shirt, the same shirt he'd worn the night we made love in the Renault. It had just been laundered and smelled like an Ivory bar.

"I have no idea, really," breathing him in more, and it was never enough, "It would be starting from absolute scratch. I know nothing, my hands would shake, I'd be worried I would break the thing at the beginning. I suppose I'd start here." I paused, gave it some thought. Remembered Atget and the blurry image of a fountain in mid-stream, just an object but if it was an object you were in love with, could the viewer sense that as well? As if to illustrate the point I turned around and took it in, our space. I was in love with it, for how we loved each other inside it, despite being so new to one another; every second here together was a discovery of some sort.

Our sanctum. Air stuck inside four stumpy walls had never seemed quite so expansive. In just five days one of them, one of the walls, had already been nearly covered with his drawings. Jack was prolific but he hated about sixty percent of anything he produced. I went into the wastebasket to rescue pieces he'd discarded. I'd insisted that the first purchase of anything between us be of paper, so that he could quickly try to move on from all the sketches he'd lost because of me, because of Cal's violent outburst. His portfolio was alive again, now also this wall alive with his curiosity and the marks it made.

There wasn't much to be done about the lack of furniture or space to put it; our clothes sat on the floor, Jack's supplies stacked in a corner. But I'd lined our one window with a few seafoam-green glasses I'd found at a five-and-dime nearby; we placed flowers in them, found on our walks in the park nearby, and so all kinds of colors danced in the afternoon light. I love that our love is blooming in the Spring right alongside the flowers; for even in the city the flowers are unstoppable. He told me he hadn't really lived anywhere properly in months, hadn't stayed anywhere longer than a few nights in so long that to feel nomadic had become the norm. This wasn't normal for him, to stay. Everyday a little pod inside this joy wilted when I worried that he was doing so only for me and that one day he would wake up and need to move too quickly. Too quickly without me.

I just hoped he knew I was up for anything, that I too could adapt to him, to his needs, in an instant. Or at least that I would do my best. I tried to communicate it. I suppose I had been doing so from the start, really.

"A beer then?" In the flick of his hand, in the raise of his brows, in the offering, a thousand words were left unsaid between us.

Make it count. To be here now, to be impervious to the consequences of a tomorrow. On a ship, on the sea, it somehow made sense.

But it was awkward, in the living of it. How could this not be awkward, my stepping down inside his world and my dress felt like a cage. What I wouldn't give to strip it off and replace it with one of the corset-less gray cotton frocks in this room, something soft and heathered and moveable. Nothing in my life was moveable or soft.

"Is that all there is?" I eyed the cask in a corner, where a huge man with pink cheeks who looked to be about sixty years old was pulling pint after pint the color of licorice. It must be a dark German lager. Jack waited for me to ask more. I didn't. What else was there to say? "Sure, then, of course. I'll take three in quick succession." I laughed and didn't expect him to at all. But he did. His eyes roamed the whole of me; I felt his gaze, then, from the top of the highest hair on my head down to where my toes met crammed together in my godforsaken heels. It was still alarming, the way he looked at me. Jack Dawson didn't follow any of the rules I'd been seeped in, the structure I'd been told was iron-clad but (I was realizing more and more) was actually thin as paper; he didn't care how something looked to me or to anyone. For a brief second I thought maybe he wanted to kiss me, right there, with the smoke swirling around us and the promise of liquid courage on our lips.

If he kissed me I would feign some amount of distress but then I would taste him. I might still go to Cal tonight, head down, but at least I would go forward with the taste of Jack on me. Once.

I put back one pint in a matter of about forty seconds. We hadn't even made it to a table. He took three fast, long sips from his own glass with his eyes on me but I was miles ahead of him. I had much more to drown inside my own head tonight.

"How old are you?" It was strange of him to ask it this late into the game of whatever we were. Friends. Were we friends?

I stood a little taller. Embarrassed, I suppose, at the answer. So many of my cohort had only just come out; many of them were still back at school, giggling over marginally-elicit paintings in textbooks and entertaining the vague notion of a suitor. That my mother had implanted me already this deeply into a commitment, even to someone like Jack, it was...was it sick? Was it ill?

"Eighteen." I sighed. Paused and drained the last dredges from the glass. I'd make three alright. I was sure of it. I spoke to the floor. "Soon, anyway, on the 26th of this month."

"You know what my mother used to say?" He sat on the bed and took his shoes off. It was almost dusk. There was little work to be had at the theater today, they were waiting on materials, and I imagined we'd spend the rest of the night as we had the past few: barely clothed or not at all, reading from one of the books we'd found in the common room. Two volumes of Jane Austen and Jack hadn't batted an eye. He read low and steady, kissed me at every third page. For the great authors to write of castles, dukes, kings, explorers, but I would venture to say that a man like Jack Dawson was instead the ideal lover and the ideal man; he handled literature delicately, dipped into it with me, caressed it, even if it what he was reading in the moment wasn't his favorite.

"What did she used to say?" I sat beside him, put my right hand on his left thigh.

"She grew up with nothing, less than nothing, even," he ran a hand through his hair, "but she made everything from nothing, you know?" I nodded. I knew enough of his childhood now to understand, at least a sliver of it. "And she always said people were too busy worrying about the crash, worrying about the fall, you know, that they forgot what a miracle life actually is." He leaned back and he looked like a sculpture to me, lean and chiseled and that tanned face. "It's a dreamland, she said, if you think about it. Existing at all. It's all a dream, in a way, so why not enjoy it."

And so we did.

I brought my knees under me, leaned toward him. Initiated the kiss and I am enamored of myself for it. To communicate so fervently to someone that I want them, this is a strange magic. Sometimes I think about Jack losing his parents so young; I think about the traumatic push of it and how it sent him out into the world to eventually run into me, eventually to save me. It took this boy from Wisconsin surviving, in the choosing of such bravery at fifteen years old, to ensure that I was even here today. Our collective trauma, it was part of how we came together, of whatever thing we would become. When the kisses lengthened and deepened I meditated on it as our tongues danced, sweet, tiny release after sweet, tiny release. Sooner rather than later we would have to be apart more, to work more; we were both aware of the little escape from reality we held together right now.

He shifted to lay down and I followed, slipped into the scoop of his left arm, our kiss unbroken.

I reached between us to unbutton his shirt, painstakingly if only because my head was dizzy from the sweet and the salt of his mouth, from how every time we kissed he found a way to make it feel like more, deeper; his tongue, pulling back to sweep across my bottom lip only to return to delve so far into my mouth that all I wanted was to consume him, reach further. When I finally pushed his shirt off, I whimpered to leave his mouth but moved my lips to his chest, placed tiny kisses down the line to his belly button, then up again, closed my eyes, felt the alchemy of it. His hands in my hair, how he loved to thread it between his fingers and sometimes pull, just a little.

This is how it happened, every time, smell and taste and sensation, all our senses lost to this witchcraft we'd created.

We tried to remain cognizant of not making a baby. We were modern. We spoke of it, of it being part of a decision we made together. We stopped ourselves often, in the throes of this thing; Jack knew what to do, of course, and I saw what it took for the discipline to overtake the arousal in those moments. But sometimes we both lost all control, like today, lost control in the thrust and the passion of the warmth of us pushed together. I worried, a little, as the days ticked by and I expected my cycle to come around very soon. As much as the romantic part of me adored the idea of making a baby with him, of being the mother of a child that was half Jack, part of him, from him, the practical side of me knew that we wouldn't be able to do the things we wanted to do if that happened.

Besides, we owed a baby more than one bare room.

We would do better, I thought and I said it, laughing against his throat after we fell from the heights that evening; yes, he replied, we'll do better, we have to. And he traced my jaw then my chin with a forefinger. I don't remember falling asleep that night but I must have very soon after this. The light outside disappearing, purples and oranges from the sunset bouncing off of windows next door, and I was so tired, so exhausted from the radical change, from a week of indulging every bit of my adrenaline. Didn't even think of dinner. I just wanted to feast on this feeling of his body intertwined with mine. And in the morning, I thought, eighteen. Officially a woman. If I wasn't already, which I highly suspected I was anyway, the number would finally prove it.

But when I awoke with the sun it was not with excitement but cold fear, for Jack was no longer beside me. Or in the room at all.

Author's Note: thanks for all the feedback re: Bird on a Beam, by the way! I'm going to work on that over the next week or two (exciting!) so the next chapter of this story might have a slight delay. As always, thank you for your support and for reading. I'm having a blast carving out a fun space for a Jack and Rose that didn't experience the trauma of the sinking—

xxRGD