Moody had seen distress flares at sea before...sternlights...masthead lights...all-round lights...but none quite like this.
Reds and blues flashing and circulating, appearing and disappearing again... something about the way they dimmed in and died out unnerved him...He couldn't exactly say why, but they had quite a foreboding effect on him.
His heart raced, but he kept his breathing steady.
Calm and calculating as he gazed into the passenger's side mirror at the police brigade lying in wait behind the Honda.
"This is the P.D.," an amplified man's voice boomed, as if he were God almighty himself. "Put your hands up and get out of the car. Surrender the gun immediately."
Surrender his weapon?
How could he trust such an order when they cornered him like an animal?
He felt for Lowe's Browning 1910 in his coat pocket.
Having no intention of ever using it, but knowing he was none the less safer by keeping it.
James looked away from the fever dream of lights dancing through the passenger side mirror.
Turning his worried gaze again on Millicent, who still hadn't stirred in the driver's seat. Her bonneted head slumping against the shoulder of his own bench.
And after theoretically "dying in a shipwreck", James was amazed to find he'd survived the collision without a scratch.
The Miss, however, had taken the brunt of the hit as her car swerved like an unbroken horse in its chase, smashing into a grove of trees off-road.
"Millie," James tried again to wake her, his eyes desperately searching her pale face for any signs of life. With only just her subtle shallow breathing giving him a small measure of hope. "Can you hear me, miss?"
And rubbing his icebergs for hands together, breathing warmth into them so he wouldn't shock her with his numbly cold fingers, James gently grazed his fingertips across her brow. Sweeping back her disarrayed hair as his fingers dragged down to the closed lashline of her eye, and slowly rounded into a pause at her cool cheek. Wishing for the warmth of his touch to coax her back to life, as he traced her heartbeat lightly against his fingertips.
The discovery of its fixed slow beating being much to his relief.
Until at long last, the chill of his wintery touch carried her back from the empty dreams of lifelessness. Making her stir against his hand as she unconsciously leaned in closer to the lulling comfort that only seemed to belong to him. Chasing his touch by her heart, rather than her senses, as if an innate longing within her had waited more than a century to find him and would be damned to wait for him any longer.
Millie's lashes slowly fluttered open to him, caught between dreams.
Feeling strangely and ruefully emptier when his hand slipped away from her cheek, as she awoke to the world again. Missing all at once that fading warmth of a dream her soul was convinced she'd once knew with this man next to her.
Even as she was absolutely sure that she never had until now.
"James?" she whispered, surprised to find that, out of all the absurdities that had hit her today, the Titanic officer from 1912 staring back at her was still more strange than anything. "What happened?"
"Easy now, Miss Millie," he urged her. "You took a right nasty hit, and moving too hastily may worsen any blood gathering in the head. It's brain congestion, I worry for."
"I'm fine," she said, though feebly enough to leave James unconvinced.
Wincing as she pressed her hand against her throbbing head, the Miss appeared entirely confused by the flashing lights parked up the embankment behind them. "Did I really just crash my car?"
"Don't remember the way of it, do you?" James questioned her, showing deeper concern. "Knocked yourself right out cold, I'm afraid."
But when?
It all happened so fast, she barely remembered it.
But James could never again forget the pack of mechanical hellhounds that gave chase of the little Honda through the steep mountain roads.
Even the wailing the hellish beastly machines made sounded to James like they were in perpetual agony.
Until the Miss's motor car went feral, wildly swerving off the road after the wheel slipped a patch of ice. Fishtailing down a steep seaside embankment until the rear of the automobile slammed into a tree below. Narrowly saving them from dipping clear off the edge of Bitter Tears Cross, into the 60-or-80-something drop of violent Atlantic ocean below.
"How long do you think we have?" Millie asked James. "Until they find us here?"
James scanned the police brigade closing in around them, his chief concern being not of his own capture, but of seeing Millicent safely to a doctor.
"I can't say, love," James spoke in gentle solace to her. "Don't be frightened. I'm still with you...every step of our way."
"I'm not frightened," she whispered back to him. "Not anymore."
"I never wanted this for you, Millie," James told her quietly. "You should be home on a night like this, in that warm cozy apartment of yours with the Captain and hot cocoa. I never meant to drag you so deeply into this maelstrom. Had I never fell by your shop and called on you to help me, you might've never-"
"Known you?" Millie's answer was soft. "I think I must disagree, Mr. Moody...Even if you finding me in my shop was only by accident, I'm glad I met you, James. I've never felt so close to anyone so easily before, and these last few days have been the happiest I've felt in a while. It was like I was so numb to everything before...I felt like a shell of myself, like a zombie...So, despite everything, thank you for stumbling into my shop when you did, and making me feel a little more real again."
"A zombie, Miss Millie?" James smiled at her ever-peculiar wording. "Considering the circumstances, I'd say a man raised from the dead, by the very definition of it, is truly the zombie. And what a monster I turned out to be to you, making a muck of all this in the end. I will hold myself accountable. If I can reason with them, then I must, for your sake. I mean to give myself up, if it's me the brigade is after. I couldn't thoil with towing you along anymore than this."
"And say what to them, exactly?" she asked him. "Nah then, bobbie gents, ah'm only just a man who skifted across time from 1912. Hold still, ye say, while yer master-of-arms buckles me wrists for the looney jug?"
"Teasing me, are you? Of course, you're teasing me at a time like this. Is that really, honestly how you judge me to sound?" he called out her rather cartoonish performance of his accent. "You might like to know, miss, that straight away, I wouldn't ramble so bluntly those exact words. I'd rather say to them..."
Millie waited expectantly for his answer.
"I'd say..." he began again.
But no matter what alternative script James strung together to counter her satire, it'd likely all sound like the ravings of a dingbat loony to the police.
"The point stands," Millie remarked stubbornly. "I won't let you go out there and throw your life away, while swearing that you did it for me. I won't live with that, James."
"But you must, miss," James insisted to Millie gently. "For all you've done for me here, I cannot let you take the fall with me. And I'd much rather see you live on as Miss Emily Amberflaw, or whatever person you wish to be, knowing that whatever you choose, you made the most of your life here. And that life was full and happy, just the way you wanted it to be, as it should always be for you."
"And don't you think you deserve that too?" Millie asked him.
"The truth of it is. I am a ghost of myself as well, Miss Millie. I belong to that past where my heart still lingers...with that love and life I left behind, which is no longer mine here. I do believe you couldn't have said it better, that the past is our past for a reason. And my life has long ago been lost with the Titanic," James said to her. "By surrendering to them, I risk nothing that I wouldn't already give instantly to you. And so, I expect that it's here we must say our goodbyes, Miss Millie."
"If you go out there," she warned him. "And tell them everything you've told me, you'll end up some place worse. You have no idea what you're walking into."
"Don't start fretting over me now, Miss Millie. I'm a seafaring man, after all, and I've come out alright through the worst of tides," James assured her, smiling in such a tragic way that only made her want to change his mind more. "Even in my darkest nights at sea, I've always found a star to guide me back to where I was meant to be. And it's to you that your stars have brought me, Millie. Brief as it might've been, these last three days, it has made time evermore dear to me. And I regret nothing of it, love."
"I suppose that's it then...That it was all just bad timing for us," Millie said to him. "In the end, we were born into completely different worlds, you and me. I belong here, and you belong there...It was always meant to be brief, wasn't it, James?"
Was there ever a chance now of rewinding back time to those 3 days?
Was there still a "normal" to return to in her apartment, if by some miracle, she could somehow convince the police that James brandishing a weapon in her shop was a misunderstanding?
Perhaps, after just one night in a police station, they'd be free to return to her warm cozy apartment, and fall asleep cuddled up with each other and Captain Wentworth, after such a long harrowing night together.
Wouldn't that be so much better than this?
Perhaps there was some loophole in the law she could use to help her fight her little identity predicament, if she were arrested tonight.
But Moody?
What rights did he have in the world of 2022, where society could call him insane and lock him up like an animal, or buy his story, by some slim chance, and then lock him up anyway as a lab rat for the rest of his natural life?
No one deserved such a fate.
And should anything happen to James after he was taken, Millie could never live with the idea of it.
And so, when it really came down to it, what other choice was there for James now, but to start all over again.
"Even if this is the goodbye we knew was coming for us," Millie continued, trying to sound determined over the swelling lump in the back of her throat. "It won't be the end for you, James. You are going out there, but not to the police."
"What do you mean, miss?"
"I wrecked my car to get you this far, and since you can't exactly pay me back in shillings to fix it, it's my rules we're playing by now," she told him. "I'll distract them. I can make up a good story. The most they can do is hold me for questioning for my ID, and then I'll get a lawyer. You, however, will never make it out of wherever they take you. So, I suggest you start swimming from here, Mr. Moody."
And reaching into her maid's apron, she caught the Heart of Ocean between her closed fingers, and pressed it into James's palm.
"You have to make a try for it," Millie whispered beckoningly to James. "If Pax was right about how this all works, it might be the only way we can save you. By giving you back your life from back there."
"Though, suppose it doesn't work as he says, and when I die, I truly die this time?" James wondered. "Suppose I am lost forever to you in history, as I should have always been?"
"I know it won't be an easy thing to do," Millie said. "But if dying with it on Titanic was how you came here, whatever happens after this, it will only be temporary, right?"
James leaned in closer to Millie, and with all the tenderness he felt in his heart for her, ran his fingers through her hair as he left a soft kiss there. Watching the red and blue lights come and go across her face, he felt instantly wistful. That somehow, he was making another great mistake by leaving her behind again.
Knowing that no matter how many chances at a new lifetime he lived to see, it would only be with her that his soul found rest. And without her, this disquieting sense of incompleteness in him would endure.
"No, my dear Millie," said he. "Dying, for me in the end, was always the easy part."
But the only gamble more wishful than dying to live again was finding a way out of that car.
Millie's eyes dragged ahead to the dark roaring sea lying in wait beyond the hood of her totaled Honda, paralleling along the cliff's edge. Realizing how precariously her car leaned against the mercy of the tree she'd just clipped.
Feeling again that dreadfully familiar turn of her stomach, upon seeing the deadly drop of a raging sea below her.
One careless move, and it'd be the end for both of them.
"Easier said than done, right?" she mumbled to James, as she stared into the crushing death trap below her driver door.
"Right, you best not look down," James advised her, as he inspected the damage of the doors and windows for any sign of an easy exit point. "Fix your eyes on anything, miss, save the water."
He tried the passenger door, only finding that it stubbornly wouldn't budge. The damage incurved around the hinge preventing him from pushing it open properly.
Leaving James no other choice but to use force, using the butt of his pistol to fracture a complicated spiderweb into the glass.
And with the window thus weakened, he knocked out the rest with his elbow, and found his way out.
"Come through, Millie, and I'll pull you over," James encouraged her, reaching back into the car to offer his hand across the seat to Millicent. "Nice and steady now."
And as carefully as she could, Millie scooted from the driver's seat to the passenger door, squeezing James's hand tightly as she nervously watched the car rock and groan against the tree trunk. Praying it didn't snap before she made it out.
But before Millie could think too long about what might happen if it did, James swooped her out the car, and her feet dropped to the ground with his. Clinging onto his coat sleeves to steady herself against his solid core.
Her white bonnet brushing the brim of his officer's cap, as she looked into his eyes one last time.
"Had it all been different for us, James, I think I could have easily loved you," she told the officer. "Good luck to you, Mr. Moody. I wish you a full and happy life in the past."
But before James could respond to anything of that gut-wrenching and sudden confession, Millicent pulled away from his arms, and marched out from behind her wrecked car, braving the flashing red and blue lights confronting her.
"Millicent," James couldn't help himself, feeling he couldn't take the permeance of goodbye just yet. All he could think to do was stop her. "Please, darling, just wait a moment."
But she had already raised her hands up in plain view of the waiting police brigade, who dropped down in a defensive position, with their guns pointed at her loaded and ready.
And remembering that their agreed upon plan was for him to stay put, James forced himself to honor her wishes.
Knowing that revealing himself in front of the brigade would only agitate the situation and make things more complicated for Millie.
And so, James could do nothing better for her in that moment, except to let her go.