11 April 1912

Rose DeWitt Bukater stared mindlessly at her untouched course—the third of the night—completely still, ensconced in the mania around her of all the well-to-dos buzzing around her like bees with witless conversation; or as maniacal as such could be. She saw her whole life before her as if she had already lived it, an endless parade of parties and cotillions, yachts and polo matches; always the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter. She writhed within at the fact that even the absence of still, unmoving earth beneath her the routine, the modus operandi continued like an orbiting planet without cessation. Not even the open ocean, the expanse between one land of dull life and the other, could give her respite from what she realized with perpetual horror would be the rest of her days. She felt like she was standing at a great precipice with no one to pull her back, no one who cared or even noticed.

It was a strange sensation to be sure, acting and moving, speaking and walking without your mind even noticing you're doing it, and Rose felt strange, indeed, as her feet carried her mindlessly towards the grand doors of the first-class dining hall.
She stood, free from the confines of the dining hall, whipped by the cold Atlantic air, feeling positively naked and exposed, able to be seen by anyone and everyone who chose to look her way in a passing glance. Suddenly her eyes exploded with tears and in so very unladylike a fashion—she could almost hear her mother admonishing her in her ear calling her a tomboy, distasteful, undignified—and she ran. She ran as fast as her feet would take her, tripping on some steps with the length of her skirt and the heels of her slippers, falling into ladies and gentlemen walking down the promenade in the night, hearing their cries of scandalization and surprise as she pushed them from her way without a thought. The dull red-orange flame of rebellion just below her soul burned again at shocking these people beyond what they would ever again have to witness.
What a horror it was; the greatest consternation they would ever have to experience being a woman who on the outside appeared to be a lady conducting herself in a fashion so the opposite. Somehow that thought made Rose sprint faster, like the propellers on the back of the very ship that was her track field, sobbing out her tears and exertion with every few impacts of her feet to the deck, away from something of which she wanted no part but to which she seemed chained like a prisoner.

Thomas Andrews had eschewed dinner; he had rebuffed Ismay in what he thought was his subtle swaying, respectfully declined to Mr. Astor, and made his polite excuses to the lot of the first-class dining party. Though he was no stranger to the ways of the elite as the nephew of a viscount and being the managing director of the drafting department at Harland and Wolff, he had always drifted toward the company of those unburdened by the rules and regulations of the upper classes and infinitely preferred the company of the prosaic, skint men who wielded together the Titanic he created than those who surrounded him like enemy flanks from the attention he received because of it.
Thus, rather than sit within the stately room of his design—listening to the band playing a florid melody as he engaged in an idle colloquy about who-did-what and who-saw-who and who-went-where-when—he sat on one of the benches at the stern deck—the third class deck—watching the stars glimmer above him and listening to the ocean skirmishing with the hull of his ship as he jotted down notes in his prized notebook about what improvements he would see made to his beloved Titanic before her next voyage.
It was a peace he knew like none another, simply a man among the elements, nestled in the kindly embrace of nature, experiencing natural life as his compeers in first-class would never know. His heart ached; he knew if they could simply see beyond the things of which they were simply handed or they so easily procured, see the life away from the material that lay waving enticingly just ahead, they could know true harmony, one beyond the false and easily squandered satisfaction that came from wealth.
Then, perhaps, the three classes need not be so divided and they could share in the mutual majestic affordances of life.
Then, just perhaps, he could build a ship without separate classes where all could mingle as the singular species they were, unseparated.
Oh, how he dreamed of it. But he was no fool; he knew such a way of living, if ever in humankind's future, was so far away no form of transportation could reach it. Not even Titanic.

So distracted was he by his philosophical and fantastical musings, writing unconsciously about the paint on the bulkheads already chipping, he almost did not notice the woman flying past him so fast he shivered at the rush of air she brought in her wake. He heard her struggling for air, lungs heaving, hair flying from its chignon at the back of her head, sobs ripping from her throat with such savagery he nearly winced. She disappeared from view within mere seconds, having run so far and from something so quickly, that he stood and followed her to the very end of the stern, the only place she could go.
His notebook and fountain pen, trustier friend than any mortal he had ever known, lay unattended on the bench beside where he sat for the first-ever time.

Mr. Andrews looked over his shoulder. No one, of course; the crew and first and second class passengers were at dinner, steerage probably four or five drinks and dances into their evening of true jubilation. Alone, he loped towards the fantail, unaware of just what he planned to do. Hold the lady while she wept? No, that would never do. Drag her by the hair back to whomever she was running from? Certainly not, that was hardly his place nor his duty.

Whatever he could have thought of doing, nothing could have prepared him for the pure, searing, abject horror of seeing the burgundy bedecked woman climbed over the gunwale of his beloved ship, leaning outwards towards the endless expanse of black, freezing ocean sixty feet below. His eyes widened, his blood running nearly as cold as the sea towards which her eyes were downcast and to which her mind was resigned. For once in his life, the logical and mechanical Thomas Andrews had not the foggiest idea of what to do.

He could hear her shivering, both from the cold and the exertion and the heartache of whatever was affecting her so, he could see her trembling beneath the measly protection of her evening gown, saw when she turned her head just so the tears glinting upon her milky white cheeks in the starlight above her and the ship's lights just behind her.
With one foot in front of the other, he walked forward. He could not tell if he were so stealthy or she simply so tormented that she did not hear what was so close behind her, but she did not notice him and kept her eyes only on the water, struggling between the thought of a harrowing death or what was evidently an even more harrowing life. His heart clenched.

"Miss, don't do it, please," he called, hand out in front of him, wanting so terribly to simply grab her and yank her to safety.
The soft red curls, tinged an orangey-brown in the night, whipped around on a startled head as she looked on the man disturbing her.
Mr. Andrews felt at once all the strength in every one of his limbs escape him like a rush of air and he felt as if all the blood drained from his heart, depriving him of his life source.
Rose. It was Rose, witty and intelligent Rose Dewitt Bukater, hanging off the stern of his beloved Titanic.

"Rose…" he whispered in dismay, so quiet under the rushing of the ship's propellers that he was sure she did not hear him.
"Stay back! Don't come any closer!" She exclaimed, like a frightened feral animal.
"Young Rose, give me your hand. Let me pull you back over," he said, reaching carefully for her.
That young plagued face sobered in realization. "Mr. Andrews. No! Stay where you are! I mean it. I'll let go!"
No, you won't, he wanted to say. If you were truly so resigned, you would have let go by now.

"You don't want to do this," he said instead.
When she looked on him again, her eyes burned nearly as bright as the hair atop her head. "What do you mean I don't? Do not presume to tell me what I do and do not want! You don't know me! You don't know a single thing about me!"
"No, I don't, Young Rose. But I should like to see you live long enough so that I may learn a thing about you."
"Don't say such things to me, Mr. Andrews. You don't care one fig about me, no one does! You're just like the rest of them. You only care that should I die your name will be attached. I'm nothing but a stricture to the reputation of the Master Shipbuilder. Go away, you're distracting me!"

He could have wept if it had been appropriate for a gentleman to weep in front of a lady, or if he had been a more selfish man. If it were not her words, her voice, the emptiness to her tone of speaking told him just how alone she felt. Should she be floating dead in the ocean it would make no difference to her, for she felt as if she were freezing in an expanse just as large without death, without a single person on which to cling or rely.

"You're wrong, Rose. I do care about you and I could not possibly give less thought to my reputation at this moment than I already am. I may not know you well nor have I known you for long, but I care, I assure you I do. I care enough that I should like to be your friend, and I care enough that I want to know what has brought you to such a state that you feel jumping off the back of Titanic is the only solution."
The turn of her head was slow now, thinking, pondering, realizing. The shivering ceased, hot adrenaline coursing through her, yet the trembling remained and was steadfast as fresh tears coursed down her pale cheeks. She did not look away from him, not for a second, as if baring into his very soul to see if he were in earnest.
Mr. Andrews stepped forward again, noticing her flinch as he did so, but continued towards her until he could hear the snivels with her every breath and the quiet clinking of the stones on her gown gently kissing the rails as they whipped in the wind.
"Please, Rose," he implored, reaching again. "Give me your hand."

And she did. Next to stepping on Titanic, his lifeblood and creation, and holding his newborn daughter in his arms for the first time, feeling the pained Rose DeWitt Bukater's cold and damp hand in his palm was the greatest sensation he had ever felt, and all too suddenly he was assaulted with the utmost need to ensure that she never felt the desire to take such drastic risks of measure ever again.

Unable to help it, Thomas Andrews chuckled, looking to their clasped hands when she turned to face him, the adrift intertwined with her rescuer. Through her tortured tears, Rose did the same as the wind whipped between them, two barriers forged into one.
"There you are, Young Rose," he whispered with a smile, like their own little shared secret witnessed by no one but the sea. "Now, step up. Careful."

She lifted one ruby red-heeled foot to the first rail. As she stepped, shifting her weight to her toes, the black netting of her frock twisted around her heel and she slipped and fell, the only thing keeping her from the death she so recently craved being the Master Shipbuilder's hands clasped around her milky arm.
"Oh, God! Help me! Help me, please!" The words ripped from her lungs as her legs swayed as effortlessly as the cloth of the Union Jack right beside them; unimportant, weak, the first of her that would meet her watery death.
"I've got you! I've got you, Rose! I won't let go."
Her frightened breaths were knives on his ears. He felt her relax slightly, encouraged by his most wholehearted promise. She put her foot again to the deck with a grunt, lifting herself before she slipped again, lower this time, her forearms hanging below Titanic's name plastered in big white letters across her stern, nearly pulling him over with her.
"Mr. Andrews! Please! Help!"

By then he could hear the clamoring of whatever White Star Line crewmen were nearby and heard her distress. He could not bring himself to care just then what conclusions they would reach on their own volition and only cared about the girl slipping from his grip.
He braced himself with one boot against the rails and pulled. At last, the dress freed itself from beneath her shoes and she stood on the lower rails with firm feet. His arms wound themselves around her waist, heaving her over as she gripped onto his shoulders like a lifeline. They fell to the deck, gasping and panting as she held him in her arms like she had never held anyone and never thought she would hold anyone ever again.

The slam of boots vibrated beneath them as Quartermaster Rowe and a couple of seamen surrounded them, and only then did Mr. Andrews unhand her and roll back on his knees away from the trembling girl on her back, struggling for breath, the hem of her dress around the tops of her thighs and her stockings ripped, showing to the world patches of milky skin always hidden away from the eyes of men.

"Oh, shit…" He heard Rowe spit under his breath in the whistling wind. "Mr. Andrews, step away from the lady."
His legs shook as he erected himself despite noticing the pleading in Rose's eyes not to leave her bereft and alone, and he backed slowly towards the rails over which he had just pulled her to safety and life anew, hands raised in a half surrender.
"Come now, Quartermaster. Let us be reasonable. Do you truly think I'd slave over Titanic's design and construction for five years and attach my name to her just to assault a lady on her decks?"
"Perhaps not, sir, but I cannot deny what I see. I shall have to get her family and the master-at-arms."
He nodded. "Do what you must. Just get her to safety."

Time passed thusly in a blur, as Rose's near-death and his witnessing of it caught up to him. He barely acknowledged the rushing of the master-at-arms, Mr. Hockley, his manservant, and another man he recognized as Colonel Archibald Gracie to the scene. He stared at his shoes, opening and closing his mouth, trying desperately and in vain to make sense of all that occurred while they talked around him, Hockley becoming increasingly infuriated at what he assumed was his fiancée's near-rape at the hands of the architect of the RMS Titanic. He did not notice Rose being wrapped in a blanket, pale and shivering, nor the master-at-arms and Rowe looking positively bewildered and betrayed at his supposed conduct, nor did he hear the girl's fiancé's blustering until he was right before him, in his face, grabbing his lapels.

"I don't care who you are or what you've done or what you've built. What made you think you could put your hands on my fiancée? What did you think you were doing, you filth?"
"Cal, stop!" Rose finally intervened, standing and shoving him from Mr. Andrews with a weak blanketed shoulder, looking up at her rescuer with all the repentance she could muster. "It was an accident!"
The man, dressed comically in his black-tie evening dress, scoffed. "An accident?"
"It was!" She cried indignantly before relaxing into a charming and demure smile with a tiny giggle. "Stupid, really. I was leaning over and I slipped! I was leaning far over to see the, uh...ah, the ah..." She closed her eyes in pensive thought, twirling her finger in a circle in animation, and, had he not been under the threat of arrest on his own damned vessel, Mr. Andrews would have laughed aloud.
"P-Propellers?" Cal impatiently spat.
"Propellers! And I slipped! And I would have gone overboard, but Mr. Andrews, here, saved me and almost went over himself!"
He could not help but smirk. Oh, you clever girl. How easily you lie. What more about Rose Dewitt Bukater am I to learn before the night is out?

"The propellers. She wanted to see the propellers!" Hockley beamed in sarcastic relief, displaying his arms as if showing with good grace everyone what a fool he was to marry.
"Like I said, women and machinery do not mix," Gracie chimed in, receiving the unnoticed glares of both Rose and Mr. Andrews and the subtle agreeing nod from Hockley.
"Was that the way of it, sir?" The master-at-arms turned to him, a certain fear in his eyes, and Mr. Andrews wondered how he would be manhandled or shoved or kicked around had he been a steerage passenger instead of the top tier of Titanic's very own brand of royalty. He could not even bear the thought.
His gaze strayed to Rose, standing upright with the thin cloth draped across her shoulders, a renewed vigor in the face of her believed lie, brave in the face of interrogation after weakness, and she begged him with her alight green eyes to go along with her absurd story. Please don't tell them that you rescued me from killing myself on your ship, they seemed to say. Please allow me this.
"Yes. Yes, that was how it was," he said to no one in particular, feeling no need to have to answer to this lot of utter fools, not on his liner.
"Well, Mr. Andrews, here, is a hero, then! Good for you, sir! Well done!" Gracie exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "So it's all's well and back to our brandy, eh?"

It was as if he had vanished into thin air with the master-at-arms shuffling awkwardly away, Gracie, fool that he was, turning with his mind only on going back to the comfort of his own selfish little world and Hockley, taking Rose and rubbing her arms vigorously with his hands and leading her away with a veneered, "Look at you, you must be freezing! Let's get you inside."
As they walked, he no longer important, Rose sagged against Hockley in defeat, Gracie stopped him and with a clearing of his throat and a jerk of his head towards Mr. Andrews said, "Perhaps a little something for her rescuer?"
"Of course!" replied Hockley, turning to his manservant. "Uh, Mr. Lovejoy, I think a twenty should do it."
Rose sputtered and scoffed, still ever the lady. "Is that the going rate for saving the woman you love? Besides, I'm sure Mr. Andrews hardly needs your money."
Her fiancé squinted, the lightest of condescending and sarcastic smirks planted on his lip, and the peaceable Mr. Andrews felt that if no one else had been present he could have wrung his neck. "Rose is displeased. Mmm, what to do?"

Hockley sauntered towards him and he tensed, feeling the congestive air just by being presented with the man. He could hardly believe that Rose could still breathe with the sheer prevalence at which she was forced to stand next to him, touch him, or, dare he imagine, kissing him.
"Perhaps you could join us for dinner tomorrow evening, to regale our group with your heroic tale, Mr. Andrews?" He spoke, the picture of false chivalry, a man with a handsome face guarding the blackest and most rotten of souls that festered and oozed forth, unseen by those around him except by those who cared in earnest to see people in their real form. And, if prevailed upon to surmise, Mr. Andrews would assume that of this group standing before him, of all of first-class, he and Rose were the only ones who cared about such things.
"Why, I'd be honored. Yes, I shall be there," he smiled but he was sure it appeared as only a grimace, eyes never leaving the fiery headed girl.
"Good. Settled then."
Towards their cabins again they walked, and with one last look from Rose, both thankfulness and sorrow blended into one beautiful glint of her eyes, she turned, lead away by Hockley into the night.

Warmth as Rose never knew swaddled her, dressed in her nightgown and dressing gown as she plopped before her vanity, polishing her mirror and brushing her hair in a sweet silence only interrupted by her beloved music box. The door just behind her opened slowly, ominously, basking Cal in the light by every miserable inch revealed and reflected in her mirror. She frowned.
"I know you've been melancholy," his voice was far too tender for a man of his character and Rose was on her guard in an instant, straightening her back with a corset of sheer suspicion. "I don't pretend to know why."
"I intended to save this until the engagement gala next week," he shoved the top of her music box down, cutting off the melody like a knife to a rope and shoved it away like a useless child's toy, "but I thought tonight…"
Diamonds glinted in the yellow light of her chamber so brightly her eyes rapidly blinked to adjust. Within the black velvet box held in his hands was a necklace, charm of royal blue so big she figured she could not close her entire small hand round it, diamonds never-ending, winding around the half-circle of the chain.
"Good gracious!" She gasped.
"...Perhaps as a reminder of my feelings for you."
"Is it a-"
"Diamond? Yes," he laughed, biting his lip, jumping up from his seat upon her mahogany vanity, shaking the mirror as he draped the cold stone chain around her neck and stared at her in the reflection as if she were a purebred hound with a new collar as opposed to his bride-to-be.

"It was worn by Louis the Sixteenth, and they called it Le Coeur de la Mer. The—"
"Heart of the Ocean," she finished for him.
Rose fingered the lavalier sitting heavily on her breast for some moments in a state of motionless shock, stunned by the beauty of it and confused beyond sense by his reasoning for giving it to her before she was snapped from her reverie with a shake of the head by his preying eyes upon her in the mirror.

"It's overwhelming," was all she could manage.
"Well, it's for royalty," he smirked. "And we are royalty, Rose."

She looked to him, thinking behind her eyes which his superficial ones could not see, wondering how he figured their being royalty of any sort was something to be lauded.
In any case, had they truly been royal, she figured it would not have been long until Cal was beneath the blade of the guillotine, betrayed by his people in the face of all his cruelties.
It was truly worrisome to Rose how easily that image came to her mind.

She felt the floor shake as he kneeled beside her chair, laying his face on the heel of his hand, observing her like a painting as he said, "You know, there's nothing I couldn't give you. There's nothing I'd deny you if you would not deny me."
For the first time, they looked on one another with their own eyes, him staring up to her, face expectant as he coyly rubbed the back of his neck like the shy schoolboy she knew he had never been.
She could have laughed. How easy he made it sound! How one-sided he made what was supposed to be love between a man and a woman seem; that she should give all that truly mattered and he should give all that did not but that he thought should matter the most. Oh, she could have laughed!

"Oh, open your heart to me, Rose," she was shoved slightly by his shoulder as if she were one of his boyhood friends being dared to jump off a high cliff into a lake.
She said nothing and turned back to her reflection, begging her eyes to erase him from her view. The pendant was cold and lifeless in her fingers as she turned it gently this way and that as it glinted and sparkled whenever it caught a beam of light. It was the pinnacle and peak of the only love she would ever receive from Cal and was the quintessence of the collective hopes and desires of her peers: material possessions. Jewelry, automobiles, furniture, art; that was all that mattered to the first class. Love did not exist, and if it did, it did not matter, it was not important, it had no bearing in the making of decisions that could change the course of one's life nor did it prove to have any credit in the abridgment of one's happiness.
How could she accept that, how could she accept this, when the heart thudding with life in her breast just beneath the weight of the royal blue diamond which had pounded as she leaned over the ship in what she thought would be its last beats, thrummed with unclaimed love to be given with every pump?

Open your heart to me, Rose.

She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to. She wanted to love him and not care about the dreary life that was laid out in front of her, bereft of adventure or surprise or deviation. She wanted to be thankful for her situation when so many others had not a fraction of what she did, were not afforded what she was. She wanted to marry Cal with no objections or opposition, to be none the wiser about to just what she was condemning herself, to make her mother happy and not be quarrelsome for, as fickle as Ruth DeWitt Bukater was, her daughter had never wanted anything more than her approval and her satisfaction at her own hand.
But she couldn't; she just couldn't! Not when Cal was as cruel and quick to anger as he was, not when she was wise and could see how drab her destiny was when her heart yearned for so much more and she knew she would shed every monetary possession she owned and give it to those who truly wanted and needed them if she could just be free of it all.
And most of all, she could not love Cal nor truly and graciously resign herself to the life he would provide when she could not be sure that, had it been him that had been there when she was hanging desperately onto the back of Titanic and onto what could have been the last seconds of her life, he would have coaxed her over the side, nor did she know if he would have wanted to at all.
Not like the kindly Irish gentleman shipbuilder whom she had so heartlessly misjudged. Not like he, who spoke to her as if there was no one dearer to him than she was, who appreciated her wit and acknowledged her grievances as if they were the most justified argument he had ever heard, who took her as she crumpled over onto the deck in his arms, and who held her in her anguish like she was the most precious creature ever to grace his eyes and ever to walk God's green Earth.

And so, the charm resting on her chest remained cold and unloved just as she was, fondled halfheartedly by her marveling fingers as she saw it just as it was: a material possession whose sole purpose was to sway her small mind to submission, bereft of a circumstance of affection and romance as she so often saw so many things.
And as Rose sat there, lost in her own world of a more ideal life just beyond her reach, she simply could not help but wonder how different things would be had she, Rose DeWitt Bukater, instead of Caledon Hockley, met Mr. Thomas Andrews of Harland and Wolff, naval architect of the RMS Titanic in England and wore his ring on her finger and his jewel around her neck.