Wild Heart: A Titanic Fanfiction
Written by Rose Gatsby Dalton
Disclaimer: This story is based on a film written and produced by James Cameron. I publish it purely for fun and recognize that I do not own these characters.
September 30, 1917
Santa Monica, California
Rose attempted to move around the kitchen as if her head did not hurt deep inside every sinus cavity. It was before dawn. Headache powders would never touch it. She tried to move as if her eyes, raw and red, weren't so dry from crying that she's taken to falling asleep these past two nights with a hot rag slung across them. She'd put a kettle up and measured out the loose jasmine tea with shaking hands, desperate to get something in her body. If she squinted then the world looked okay. Barely.
The dust hadn't even begun to settle. The trauma, amassing, the sinking feeling again.
She hadn't eaten anything since he left and if it were only her to worry about perhaps that would be fine. She could see a world in which the hollow feeling in her heart would just be mimicked by an outwardly hollow appearance…sunken eyes, her ribs showing, looking like a ghost. Feel as if a ghost, look like one. This morning in the mirror her ribs, in fact, looked way too pronounced above where she grew and her midwife would arrive next week to scold her.
As she sat down to blow on the tea in the teal cup, a ceramic piece she and Jack bought almost two years ago when they first moved into this house, she thought more about the cruel irony of it. Five years they had waited. Traveled the country by rail, almost twice. Climbed mountains. Traced coastlines with their bodies like they were fingers on the edge of a cup. Danced in places you shouldn't dance. Saved and saved and slept in corners and imagined this house. Then saved some more. And all the while so modern in their intentions, so careful, all the millions (for it seemed, at least) of times they'd brought their bodies together they had been careful and watchful. Sacred. It was sacred to make love but to be so acutely aware of delaying a whole other part of their lives they felt unready for. How glorious to live in a world where she could take control of her body this way, use it and fuel it and love him with it unabashedly. If she had married Cal then she would have been expected to bear any baby that came right away; she had been, to him, largely just an empty womb, a vessel.
Rose and Jack, they always knew they wanted children but they'd been so young at the beginning. Rose hadn't even crossed the threshold of her eighteenth birthday when they kissed after vows at the Brooklyn courthouse, tasting both like coffee and nerves and all that was to come. The saltwater was still embedded on their skin.
But this Spring they'd decided. It was a cool night in April and they'd brought blankets to the front porch like they often did. The ocean was just about a quarter of a mile away and they always smelled the salt, it always burned their nostrils, a constant reminder of fantasies fulfilled as well as all the fears before.
"I had a dream last night." She rolled her head over so that their faces were close again. He smiled, languid after a cold lager in the light of the moon.
"Did I have clothes on in this one?" He raised his golden eyebrows.
"Absolutely never." She laughed and paused, swallowed. Once she said it, there'd be no going back. They hadn't ever put a timeline on this, only spoken in giddy whispers once in a while, buried under covers. "But, I…Jack, it was rather tranquil, and you know my dreams are usually chaotic." He nodded, amused, curious. "I was walking down the beach and the middle of my body felt heavy. It was raining, but I wasn't worried about the rain. It was so peaceful. I was walking with a purpose. And then I heard something."
Jack bit his lip and wanted so badly to kiss her face, over and over again, amazed after these years still at how particularly beautiful she looked when trying to explain something.
"What was it?"
"I looked down and it was a little girl…a baby, in a sling, a green sling, heavy in the middle of my body."
"Our baby?" He sighed and the sigh seemed connected by an invisible tendon to his smile. His hair was shorter now, and it made him look younger than he even was. Twenty-five but a schoolboy, inside his smile.
"Who else would it belong to, you maniac?" She laughed and closed her eyes. Waited.
"Are we ready?" His right hand came to her stomach, flat as she laid on her back, and he smoothed over the soft linen band of her dress. Warmth always radiated from her. He'd been thinking about this in some capacity for five years. In the back of his mind, a haze, tied inextricably to tragedy but also to hope.
"I am. I think I am." She put her hand on top of his. "If you are. If not…"
He leaned in then so quickly to kiss her, the nutty flavor of the beer on his bottom lip. How many times had their tongues met in urgency like this?
He pulled back just a centimeter, talking into her mouth.
"Rose. Never been more ready for anything."
And then of course he'd make a joke about how much fun the work would be, the trying. They'd ended up tangled in their sheets that night as they often did, but this time with a special buzz in their heads, at the ends of their feet. The promise of what could come. A family.
It was a wonder, they soon realized, that they'd never come to be with child by accident in these five years. For once they gave it any kind of effort, removed any kind of barrier, Rose conceived so quickly that she knew within a few weeks. Her courses were late but it was evident beyond even that. The flutters of excitement and nausea competed in her belly. She could consume only soda crackers and lukewarm water for the first couple of months. After she saw the midwife and they had the absolute confirmation Jack unbuttoned her dress and laid one delicate kiss on her abdomen.
"We're waiting for you, little bird," he whispered, and Rose's heart had somehow never felt as full as that moment.
To have fallen in love upon the sinking of a ship. To have been extracted from that water somehow, healthy, untouched. To have made a life successfully together, cloaked in joy, after knowing one another for a matter of days.
The sweeping insensitivity of the universe, though! The anger boiled in her and she shook her head, bringing the cup to her lips seeking momentary relief from the burning pain in her chest.
The war had been on everyone's minds for years, but out here in California it just never felt as though the brutalities of it would actually come to find them. The news of things like the Lusitania's sinking, of course, truly like glass to swallow, but life was so good in their day to day that Jack and Rose remained in denial. Jack had, un-shockingly, managed to parlay his pier-side portrait business (often supplemented by shifts at a pub, to be fair) into a job at the local newspaper. And from there he'd begun working with a few tiny publishing houses. His signature, the aesthetics of his black and white sketches, were known here. Rose had happily run around as a production and costume assistant at the Santa Monica Opera House. Her hair was longer than ever now, wild and unpinned, and Jack often joked that she would be mistaken for a literal angel walking among the living. They had friends, a mix of bohemians and academics and orphans such as they.
There was this baby on the way, due just into the new year.
And then the letter came. And the cruelest part of it, really, the stain of this, was that if Rose had already HAD a baby, if Jack were the father of an infant, he might have been spared in the draft. But in the eyes of the US government, he looked perfect for the part: healthy, twenty-five, married but no children and his wife had an income. Rose cursed her job. She cursed the house. Perhaps if they were still living wages to wages in a boarding house with no hot water then he wouldn't have been taken away.
"Rose, I can't look back." His shoulders were shaking and she pulled him closer, wished she was taller so that she could scoop up every morsel of him. Behind his shoulder the mess and the noise of the trains. A pair of siblings playing hide and seek. Perhaps they'd had to say goodbye to their father, so she forgave the fact that they'd knocked into her knees earlier. "Once I get on, I'm not going to look back, I can't." She nodded against him. His voice cracked just a tiny bit. Never had it before. "If I do, I won't be able to go."
"I know." Her tears bled on the uniform, and she didn't care. She hated the damn thing. Between them the baby stirred. The past few days she'd felt the flutterings, the quickenings. Not enough of a kick for Jack to feel from the outside, though. He would leave for Europe without having felt his baby kick. And when he got back, he or she would be a fully-realized person. He would miss it all.
"I'm going to miss it all." His mouth on her hair, his tears in her hair. Everything, so wet.
"You'll be here, Jack," and she took one of his hands and laid it on her heart, then on her belly, where she was decidedly swollen now, her dresses tight. "You're here with us, always."
It would be weeks before she got a letter. It would be weeks before she heard anything. In the past five years they'd spent not a night apart, not until he got on that godforsaken train.
She wandered into their bedroom, one wall full of windows (which is why they'd wanted this house), and took a deep breath at the sunrise, today the color of a ballet slipper. In the bottom drawer of her bedside table lay the journal she'd kept sporadically since right after the sinking. She wrote in it less and less now, found that its original purpose was therapy for the shock of her new life. But she opened it this morning, on her lap, one hand on the paper and one hand on her stomach, which had thankfully now inside it a baby, a solitary piece of toast, and one ripe apricot.
Apr 25, 1912
Six days since we were married. I look down at the simple band on my left hand and it is exhilarating but also terrifying. I look at him across a pillow, across a table, and in some moments he is still a stranger. But then he touches me and somehow it's written on my bones, isn't it, and his too, this thing between us. I awoke a moment ago and his leg was hooked over mine. I blush at how bold I've been, at our bodies in motion together.
The pleasure of these moments make me feel guilty. For all that was lost, for all that were lost. But we have decided to live extra, if we can manage, for them all.