I apologise for any bad Italian - Google told me what to say :)

March 1912

March was just about to end, giving way to April. A month always filled with such promise of a new adventure. April was the opening to Spring, where the showers came in plenty but the sun was warm enough to sometimes shed an outer layer. The happier months were approaching, that was something that Jack could feel within him, even as a man who never lived past the next moment. A change even could come to sweep him like a tidal wave away from the streets of Paris and into unknown territory. Wasn't that the thrill? The thrill of living life on the edge of the unknown.

Paris had not been filled with such promises though. Although it had given Jack Dawson plenty of opportunities to draw and expand his horizons of travelling across a beautiful country, it felt that was where it ended. To experience bohemianism at its finest and to finally introduce his friend Fabrizio to the touch of a woman had truly become highlights.

Now, though, smoking another roll up, and thrusting his bag across his shoulder, Jack shook his damned head in response to his friend's question.

''No, Fabri, nothing.''

''You did not make love to her?''

Fabrizio Di Rossi was a lost soul just like Jack. Having left Italy some months before to look for adventure, he had found work and a love of money. He worked to live and every cent went towards an ultimate goal; to travel to America, the one place which Jack had yet to return to since leaving five years before. Together, they had created something of a team and whilst the absolute opposite in so many ways, they found an infinity in many others. In the strangest of ways, they had become like brothers.

''No, my friend.''

"Was she ah—" Fabrizio gestured to Jack whilst snapping his fingers, to find the correct word in English.

"Lovely." Jack nodded, ruffling his friends black hair as he exhaled his cigarette and glanced about as Fabrizio still knitted his brows together in a fashion to convey his puzzlement. ''Beautiful.'' Jack corrected, speaking slower to ensure his friend understood.

''But…you not made love to her?''

Jack could only raise a brow, and ignore his friend's queries. ''No, I would tell you if that happened.''

''Si, j'adore l'amore…'' Fabri's terrible attempt at French caused Jack to stumble his way through the grassy hills of Giverny in amusement.

''You spend two days with a lovely girl wrapped around you and you're floating on air.''

''Si, a happy man.''

''Si,'' Jack agreed, still seeing his friends querying brow. ''Giselle just posed for me. I think that she has the most beautiful hands that I have ever seen.''

Fabrizio raised a thick, black brow and ran to catch up with Jack's heavy hiking before parading his large hands about his friend's face and examined them as though he had grown another limb.

''Hands?''

Jack wafted Fabrizio away, half irritated and half amused.

''Yes, just her hands.'' Jack narrowed his eyes, gazing about the endless landscapes. ''Sometimes, I just see the beauty in one thing, y'know, like her hair, or her smile. Sometimes it is just a hand or a part of any person which is flawed but beautiful.'' Jack told Fabrizio, more explaining to himself than anything. Seeing his friend's carelessness of the matter, he changed topics. "Where are we headed today?"

Fabrizio shot Jack a look of half understanding whilst he still tried to dissect the fast paced way of Jack's American tongue to his own native. His brown eyes were filled with such naivety which was eager for an adventure.

"Where we go?" Fabrizio confirmed and Jack nodded.

"Si, dove andiamo."

"Ah, you comprendere?"

"Yes," Jack smiled, his good natured smile causing Fabrizio to curse in Italian before they continued to enjoy a cigarette beneath the warm, Spring sunshine. Across the way, a couple of children played with a ball, their parents watching nearby upon a grassy verge. The parents were mid-late thirties and their children varying in age from a baby to adolescence. Jack watched their interaction. Their laughter and energy pierced the air. He grew lost in someone else's moment and without even knowing it, the cigarette which he had been smoking was discarded to the wind and his charcoal was within his hands and working away, scratching at the paper until a picture emerged: it wasn't grand. Wasn't worth hanging in the Louvre but it was real, drawn from life by a man barely out of his adolescence and filled with such passion about his craft that it filled him day and night. How he had survived on little sleep, cheap beer and the production of hundreds of drawings which never seemed to amount to much. He had shown it to folks about Paris and they looked at it with a chuckle or a nod. Once the drawing was done, it sat within a portfolio filled with countless others. Faces he had never seen more than once, faces he would see again and no doubt, some of the most beautiful he had ever seen. The Parisian women were happy to pose for him, and indulge his appreciation for the female body in all of its glory and beauty. From soft curves of flesh, to slender and toned limbs. The passionate and the shy. The hands to the feet. Jack had sketched them all and found endless loveliness in them. Their unabashed approach to life and their sexuality made Jack appreciate their company even more but never had he been emotionally attached. Never had he had a love affair with them: the trust between an artist and his subject should never be broken. Barriers should never be reached across. Not those kinds anyway.

Another cigarette dangled from his lips, as now his line of sight was clear of life, aside from the landscapes but Jack was no Monet. He would never be one to use a watercolour or a canvas. Jack was restless again, his fingers itching to draw and his eyes eager to drink in.

"Come on, let's go." Hitching his bag across his shoulder, Fabrizio jumped to his feet to join Jack on what would be their next adventure.

They would walk for hours. Take shelter beneath bridges and hitch a ride from strangers if they need to. Their travels took them to Giverny where purely by mistake did Jack gaze upon the famous lilac flowers and beautiful brickwork of Monet's home.

Afterwards they would lay in the field, laughing until their stomachs hurt and their cigarettes were low in the stash.

Some days they ate two meals, sometimes it was two or three days without. The beauty of life on the road though was that there was another who was kind enough to share with them, the unfortunate ones. A crust of bread. A slice of ham or cheese and a sip of beer and a cigarette. Sometimes Jack would bargain for a meal in exchange for work. Sometimes he made barely a cent and others the equivalent of a full dollar in the warmer months.

The nights were spent in a bar or a garret, drinking what they could before dawn and before Fabrizio fell asleep and then that was when loneliness enveloped him like an unwelcome embrace from his enemy. Spending nights in the bed of a nameless woman was a good distraction but only for a couple of hours. They never wanted more and he never asked for it and even if they did, he was a man who would never know how to give love to them. Never once had he felt anything in his bones that could connect him to a woman.

Jack loved his friends, loved his parents, or what he recalled of them and he loved to draw. Beyond that, it felt impossible to ever think of falling in love and so, in typical artists fashion, late into the night, Jack would lay and study the stars and consider the meaning of life. Of this great hand of fate he had been dealt five years ago when his parents' deaths had enabled him a freedom he could never have achieved if they had lived. Of how he had been granted some sort of luck despite his lack of fortunes.

His father would study the stars, sneaking him as a boy from his warm bed outside in the freezing cold to watch the stars as it would fade into the sunrise. Perhaps his slightly eccentric father was the reason for his own love of life, of adventure and of the beautiful way in which nature surrounds them. Jack Dawson senior had grown up on the same farm that Jack had, lived the same life Jack would have, but his father had one wish and that was to see the sea but he died in the same town that he had been born in just forty years before. It was barely an age.

Isabella Dawson was a petite woman who had nearly died giving birth to Jack. She had wanted more than a house full of children and she never had another after Jack. Loving and doting to the very end of her life, Jack couldn't have asked for a better mother or safer pair of arms to take salvation in.

Contemplation was key in Jack's life, but taking action was even better. These cigarette daydreams which he allowed himself to fall into when the world grew quiet were some of the best parts of the day. How could one not revel in their own thoughts with just the peaceful sky to search for the answers?

''Why is my heart not in Paris?'' Jack exhaled aloud, the cigarette smoke trailing upwards…almost towards the stars. Where is my heart? Was a better question. It wasn't that he didn't care. Didn't love. Didn't…feel. Perhaps it was just the bitter disappointment in the hand that fate had dealt him. Perhaps he had pinned too many hopes on one place. One City. One time. It all felt so disappointing to him now.

He thought of Madame Bijoux, the sixty-something year old woman who Jack had met in the bars he and Fabri had spent so many nights consuming cheap beer and dancing to all sorts of music. She would sit, at the end of the bar, alone, wearing every piece of jewellery that she owned; a stark contrast to her misshapen and moth-eaten smock and clothes. There had to have been rubies, emeralds, sapphires…every colour which one could imagine. When she walked to and from the tavern door, there was a slight rattle to her as she went, as well as the tap-tap-tap of her wooden cane. Rumour had it that she was sitting, waiting for her long lost love. Just as she had waited there every night for thirty years. Rumour had it they were to run away together on one certain night and he never came. Rumour had it he had married elsewhere. Another said he was killed in a fight. But…what was the truth? Jack would never know. There was only one thing which he did know; the sadness within her eyes. The way that she would clutch onto the beads of her necklace. Twist the rings upon her fingers. She would sit and drink three glasses of red wine before she would retreat to the place which she called a home. That stark sadness was what propelled Jack to take out a blank page one night and draw her. It was a poignant moment, as he almost related to the loneliness radiating from her. Almost wished to tell her to move on and to forget the man who she loved, even after so long, but there was nothing a guy like him could ever do or say to a woman who was so deeply melancholy. A woman who was barely existing. And so, after completing the sketch, he left the bar and knew that he would never see her again. Instead, taking the memories with him. A lesson. A valuable one. Life was worth living, regardless.

''Posso avere una sigaretta?''

Fabrizio's tired voice cut through his own deep thoughts. In response, Jack threw the tin of his rolled cigarettes towards his friend as he finished his own smoke and rolled over onto his front.

Fabrizio stretched from the nap he had taken on the brow of the hill and now, as the sun was setting across Giverny and the sky was painted an array of colours, Jack could only wonder if Monet was awake to see the same beautiful skies which he laid beneath.

''I wonder what lies past these hills.''

Fabrizio frowned, deeply confused. ''Cosa hai detto?''

Jack shook his head, instead laying backwards upon the hill and watched how the darkened sky gave way to the morning sun. Being a witness to such beauty that nature offered was astounding. In Santa Monica, he had found peace in the waves and the beach there. Suddenly, he felt a stupid and slight pang for home. For warmth.

''I said, I wonder where we can go next?''

''L'America.''

Laughing, Jack pulled himself to a sitting position. ''I think it's that way,'' he pointed East, ''if you start walking now you'll arrive by the time you're fifty.''

''Sei un bastardo.''

''You call me that every day and you still lay here asking me for a cigarette, you asshole.''

Jack lurched forward to pinch at Fabrizio's chest but soon, they were howling until their stomachs hurt. They fought like brothers, rolling down the hill as they playfully hit each other, pinching and slapping just like children did. As Jack caught Fabrizio's hat, tossing it off into the winds and catching him into a headlock, they finally gave way to laughter.

''Am I still a bastard, huh? Who's the one who got these cigarettes.''

''You're pazzo. My hat!''

''The damned thing needs a wash, a dip in the Seine will do it good.''

''No!'' Fabrizio launched into a tirade of Italian expletives before he managed to launch himself backwards, taking Jack with him and freed himself from the headlock with his own hair a complete mess. Jack watched, with his hands behind his back, lazing on the brow of the hill as Fabrizio chased his treasured hat, retrieving it from the winds. That was one memory seared into his mind, forever, somehow.

It was the next day, on a windy and quiet morning, that a newspaper headline had caught Jack's attention as he sat smoking a cigarette, watching Parisian life go by. It had grown old to him now and he was ready for another journey of some sort.

In a cloud of smoke, his mind daydreamed off to just what could lay ahead for him. When one started to awaken in a morning and not feel that excitement in the pit of his belly, that was when it was time to move onwards.

It was then, almost, as though fate dealt him another crazy hand as paper went flying from a gentleman's grasp and straight towards Jack in a strange windy whirlwind.

''Damned April showers.'' Jack cursed, as he took a moment to scan the newspaper, as the gentleman watched him in complete surprise.

There was a picture of the Titanic. A ship so grand in scale that even royalty were sailing on it. The damned thing had dominated the headlines for about a year as far as he recalled but it was only the sure fire date which had sparked the same flare of desire within him to travel as it had five years before when he left Eau Claire after scrambling aboard a steamer as a stowaway. Perhaps this would be the answer to the restlessness which Paris had started to gift him with.

The ship would set sail in two weeks. A giant piece of damned history and he would be there to witness it leave the docks.

Slamming the paper into Fabrizio's lap, scaring him away from his dozing state. Jack got to his feet feeling determination fuel him for the first time in so long.

''Look at that, Fabri!''

''What is it?'' Fabrizio looked at the paper through squinting eyes. ''Una nave. Ti-tan-ic.''

Stamping into his boots, Jack tied the laces as quickly as he could, forgetting that Fabrizio could not read or write in his native language, never mind read French or English.

''It's a damned ship full of rich snobs. Practically Goddamned royalty.''

Jack explained, completely fired up and ready to head onwards to wherever this freak wind was to take him. Fabrizio, was less enthralled by the black and white image of a ship.

''You want to go to America, my friend?''

At the mention of the word 'America', Fabrizio perked up, his eyes querying if Jack was serious.

''It is ah…lot of money.''

''Sure, but we can give it a try. God loves a tryer, doesn't he?''

''What if we lose and are found?''

''You got anything to be back here for?''

Fabrizio took a moment to respond, after processing what Jack had asked. ''Ah…no.''

''You wanna go back home, to your mom and sit in that small house until you die?''

''No.''

''You coming to England?'' Jack hauled his backpack across his shoulder.

''But…America? Si? Pazzo.''

Sighing, Jack just started to walk away, and soon enough, Fabrizio was hot on his friends heels pulling his hat upon his head and they picked up a pace.

''Si, pazzo.'' Jack agreed, as he pulled out a cigarette and offered one to Fabrizio. ''One life, my friend. We have to live it. You with me?''

Fabrizio tried to keep up. Mostly understanding what had been said. But underneath everything, Jack knew that his friend trusted him, because that's what friends did.

''Si.''

Jack clapped his hand onto Fabrizio's shoulder. ''Good man, now let's see what we have to look forward to next, huh?''