Gazing into the Atlantic waiting beyond the cliff's edge where he stood, James counted on himself as a strong swimmer.
And if it was by the ocean he came, he might surely make the jump and leave his fate again to the sea.
Had it not been for one last agonizing question that kept his feet stubbornly fixed on dry land.
Will she really be ok after all?
Could he trust that leaving Millie behind was the best decision for her?
Would she be made to suffer on his behalf?
James turned his gaze back in Millie's direction.
His heart torn in a tug-o-war caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
To stay here with her or go back to his own world in 1912?
Return to Titanic as a damned man, or remain in 2022 as a prisoner?
Of little consequence is the place, so long as it's with her.
They were the only words that came to James's mind as he stared into the sea storm carried in by night over the restless ocean, knowing it was the only sure answer for him after all.
I want to be with her, always, and nowhere else.
And without any time to properly weigh the consequences of going back on their plan, James went with his gut feeling and chose his heart in the end.
Turning his back away from his freedom at sea and hurrying instead after Miss Millie.
"I got a visual!" a police officer shouted, ducking back behind his car door to take cover as he held Millie at gunpoint. "Hands in the air! Get on the ground now!"
And witnessing Millicent being threatened in such a barbaric manner, James instinctively drew the Browning 1910 from his coat pocket.
"Lower your weapons," he ordered the police brigade, utterly disturbed by their callous brutality toward an innocent woman who had done nothing to deserve it. "It's me you want."
"He's got a gun on him!"
The police officers quickly followed suit, ducking again behind the doors of their own cars as they drew their Glocks.
"Drop your weapon now!"
Stepping between their guns and Millicent, James scanned them with his own pistol.
He was outnumbered and his hand trembled ever slightly, but he refused to back down.
"James, what are you doing?" Millie demanded of him. "Are you crazy?"
"Forgive me, miss," he said to her. "But the rules have changed."
"Drop the gun and put your hands behind your head!" another cop ordered.
"If you allow her to go free," James made his conditions known to the police. "I'll do everything as you ask."
"I said drop the fucking gun now! I'm not gonna tell you again!"
"There's been a misunderstanding. I'm not a nuisance," James tried to reason with them. "I'm telling you, a misunderstanding, it is. The lady has done no one any harm."
"He's not complying! You're gonna have to take him out!"
"James, no!" Millie's hands desperately grabbed the officer by his sleeves to pull him back from the all-but-suicidal duel he'd challenged with the police. "You have to get out of..."
But James Moody had no time to pull her out of the way when three gunshots fired off in rapid succession.
And in the end, it only took one.
James felt the shudder that went through Millicent's body as she lost her strength against his, her breath taken by the pain of the bullet that ripped through her side. Tearing through her white apron, and shredding its path of devastation into her lungs.
And after that moment, all she felt and heard in her body was pain.
Drowning out the sound of her name on James's lips, as she guarded her fall with the steadiness of his own body, so she wouldn't hit the ground.
All her mind could think about was pain, barely registering why the blur of James's face looked so devastated, and why he appeared to be in a panic as he looked back and forth between her and the wall of officers behind her. Shouting something she couldn't hear over the slowing ocean tide of her breathing, that seemed to mercifully take the pain away from her, little by little, with every breath she exhaled.
The relief so comforting, in fact, that Millie thought for a moment that she was actually getting better.
Why does he look so worried?...Is it really that bad?
James pulled her closer to his chest, as if the rhythm of his beating heart would save hers, and stop the life from gradually dimming in her summerly hazel eyes.
And being no stranger to death, James saw it clearly in the face of his beloved now.
Her breathing turned into silent choking against his chest. Her color passing into a ghostly gray as her natural instinct to breathe met a stalemate with the pooling of blood in her collapsed lungs.
An excruciating and cruel death to endure.
The wound was fatal.
"Millie, don't shut your eyes, love," James pleaded with her. "Stay with me. There are doctors here who can save you, if you can keep yourself awake just a while longer. I beg of you, Millie, please open your eyes."
But as her heavy lashes batted slower, and her complexion became grayer with so much loss of blood, James knew he was asking more of her than she could now ever give him.
And it was then that James felt exactly what Henry Wilde had always tried to make him understand, in feeling that he might endure anything, but the cruel fate that took away a beloved so dear to him. So unbearable the emptiness left behind when the object of one's love is ripped away, it seems impossible that such a thing can ever happen. That a man can feel that he has been ripped to pieces across the planes of the universe, impossible to be made whole again.
'When you meet the woman you love,' Wilde had said to James once. 'Love her deeply, as if God will take you both tomorrow.'
And holding Millicent against him, ne'er so strong enough to stop tomorrow now, for all his seafaring prowess, James knew then that he and Wilde were two entirely different men, and that Titanic's Chief Officer was a man of far greater courage than him.
How might his heart ever imagine moving on from this?
Had his and Millicent's last night on Titanic been much the same?
Feeling her warmth gradually leave her body, and having no power to save her.
"I've only again just found you," James told Millicent, his body trembling as he tried not to lose himself against his fast breaking heart. "It was supposed to be different this time."
And knowing that it shouldn't have ever happened this way, James was inconsolable and sick to his stomach with heartache, and the cutthroat brutality of this draconian world that mercilessly took Millie from him.
Turning his gaze up to the police officers, who still held him at gunpoint, James's words were subdued by incredulity, "What have you done?"
"Get on the ground now! Hands behind your head!" a police officer screamed at him. "That's the last time I'm gonna tell you!"
"This is murder," James swore heatedly. "Save her, damn you! You cannot allow her to die like this!"
"Back the fuck away now! Don't force me to put you down, buddy! I don't wanna have to do that!"
But James Paul Moody of Titanic was already dead.
He had nothing left to fear of death.
They could do with him as they pleased, for what he should care.
"I love you, my darling. I always have loved you. I couldn't wait for you to come home, so that I could tell you myself tonight," James pressed his face into Millicent's hair, with each of his repressed murmurs breathing in the dreamy scent of violets he loved so well, stained by blood. "I'm sorry, I'm so terribly sorry. Forgive me, my love."
Because what lay in his arms now was unmistakably his to answer for.
Once more, Millicent's life was over, and whether he remained trapped in this troubled reality or returned to his own, James Moody was again a broken man.
And he knew he could never bear the crushing memory of watching her die all over again like this.
He'd always wish there was a way to undo time for her.
To alter history so that Titanic, his ill-fated meeting with Millicent, and his failure to stop her untimely death again had never happened.
He wished more than anything that Patrick Crawley's mad theory was the truth of it.
That crossing through time might also happen in reverse.
That there was a way still to retreat back into the past, when Millicent was still alive on the gangway ramp with him in Belfast, or back in her shop tormenting him with her quirky clocks and daffy spectacles.
What if it wasn't just his own past he could transpose, but hers mutually?
And glancing to his right, James counted a short distance of 3-5 paces off the cliff's edge into the ocean, as the stormy tide pummeled its wrathful surf into the rocky shore.
God in heaven...
It was damn preposterous.
Surrender his own life again to an insufferably painful death by sea?
All for a theory that had no sound evidence from the beginning?
Not even a madman would fancy such an idea!
But damn it to hell, it was all James had left to try.
And try he would, if it brought Millicent back to him in the end. Because wouldn't he face anything, if it was for her?
And so, deciding that it had to be the way of it, no matter what should come, James surrendered all thought of self-preservation and rationality.
Squeezing Millicent tightly against him as he stole away to the cliff's edge and took the harrowing plunge.
Until in a final act of mercy, death violently ripped him again from this world.