HEARTS CAN BREAK
Chapter Twenty-One

Across the sky glowing like orange embers, Rose’s pain, grief, and guilt was painted in a thousand pictures. She tried to block it out but it was like water against a wall...it just pressured harder, hurting more, and angrily whirled through her spirit, ravaging heart and soul with every breath she took.

It was the sort of pain that exceeded all physical expectations. It had completely torn the foundations of her new life from her, taken the very being from her body. Something about it made all humanity stop, all of everything vanish. Time was frozen, eras were frozen, emotions were frozen–all into the heart-rending mountain of love and pit of despair. Was it truly a sin to feel, at one point in your life, that you didn’t have to live for yourself, that you could live for someone else?

Jack...she remembered everything about him, everything–the way his eyes danced when he drew, the way his sideways, boyish grin made her heart melt into a silver lake. There was something about him that had been so pure, so right, so true...so...so Jack Dawson.

She tried to ignore the new feelings that were welling up inside her, but she couldn’t. Somehow she felt cheated and betrayed. The sea had promised her such a future–and then in that ripping, timeless way had torn it away from her before she could take a breath.

Now her breaths didn’t matter. Each one hurt like a stone on her chest, but she didn’t feel it. She was rasping for life, but she didn’t want to. She wasn’t being haunted by demons. She was being haunted by Satan himself, the deceiver, Lucifer, the traitor.

Did you really have to leave me? I’m not ready to be alone. I can’t stand by myself. I’m falling and falling into this goddamn blackness and the worst part is...I can feel you, Jack...and then you’re gone. I can’t see you, but I can feel you. In my dreams I can feel you. And all of a sudden you leave me all over again in this constant session of pain and guilt...Jack, save me. Please save me. Before, I didn’t want to be saved but you saw through me...save me again.

Somehow she felt that whisper of a prayer drop from her soul and drain across the lonely Atlantic. No one could hear her cries. No one could feel her anguish. No one could ever understand the suffering inflicted upon her. No one could ever experience such deep, deep cold–a cold that sliced through her body like a melting knife, a cold that swirled in frost around her and gripped her heart with a steel grip of ice.

The waves crisscrossed in an ancient silky pattern, colored with melted blue tears and frozen green promises. They silently lapped on the boat, making whispers of desire from her Jack to his Rose. These whispers were lost in time, were driven away from the dying flower before she reached them. Each time the sounds of love were taken from her, a petal floated to the ground of humanity, leaving her as nothing but a shaking, fragile stem, brittle from ice and the weight of torture.

She wanted to beg to be sheltered from the true world, from this world of such utter terror and pain. Jack had shown her the joy, the happiness, the freedom...but he had left out terror and pain. The loneliness, the bitter truth, the black fear. Everything that she had considered nonexistent merely hours ago was all that surrounded her, wrapping her soul like a thick blanket, squeezing harder and harder at the last life she had in her, suffocating her to death.

Isn’t this what Jack fought to save me from? This constant feeling of suffocation, of draining, of no hope? And now here I am all over again, alone, so, so alone...

It came like a lightning flash of evil. She began to fervently wish she had never met Jack Dawson, never met the man who had been destined for her, who was her fate, who was her very breath. She inwardly yearned that she had never seen him smile, seen the beautiful bare story of death and life itself in his exotic blue eyes, felt her stomach take wing when he laughed. She wanted to never have kissed him and experienced that once-in-a-lifetime emotion that told her this love was for eternity and she was his for all universes to come. She regretted ever falling in unimaginable, fiery, amazing, stark, truthful love.

Her tears finally spilled over, dripping down her cheeks, filled with the cold suffering of remorse, falling with the white-hot slicing hurt of loss and betrayal. Each one stung her cheek and imprinted her spirit, crying desperately for a savior that had been forever silenced beneath power and might that overshadowed herself. The tears’ voices wound in the air around her, shrieking and screaming a million different meanings but only one word–Jack.

Desperately, she knew that she had to stop the bleeding from her soul. Her blood pooled around her, invisible but leading her to the door of death all the same. She was lost, wanting to forget and wanting to die. Before she could think, she heard only one thing–no more.

She sunk into a craze of indescribable grief and fury, a fury that suddenly burst like a red flame. Frantically, she could feel her heart closing, trying to shut itself against the still alive passion of a now dead man. Her soft sobbing turned to loud, mournful weeping as she clicked the key of her insides, locking her emotions away from Jack Dawson. Something inside of her burned with a pain that exceeded anything she had felt yet. She was being torn by her decision, by the sacrifice of a being to a lesser person. Everything began to wave in her vision and she suddenly screamed aloud, letting the sound fall across the sea–the beautiful, deceiving, crazy, wild Atlantic that had condemned her to a death worse than she knew existed.

"No!" she shrieked, not caring who heard. "I can’t do it!" For in the corner of her mind, she had seen his reaction to her selfish act of closure. He simply stared at her, showing her the awful thing she had done through his haunting eyes, the ugliness of her feelings, the plundered beauty of a Rose that was now nothing but a crumbled brown dust. She couldn’t look at herself through another. It hurt too much to see and feel dead tears raining down his eternal face.

Oh God, Jack, she inwardly sobbed, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing–I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!

And in her mind’s eye, she threw herself at him and felt him hold her. His strong arms closed around her and his scent of work and tears and laughter fulfilled her. She could feel the tickling softness of his breath in her ear as he murmured sweet sayings meant for no one but her, only his Rose. Her skin felt the texture of his limp, over worn white shirt and the soft curves of his lips. They were flying, soaring above Titanic and all of the hell she had raised when she had fallen.

And it was then that she realized that she could never lock away her smoldering, gentle, and fierce emotions from the one who had created them, breathed life into each feeling again and again. Her thundering pulse subsided into its earlier dying rhythm.

I’ll never desert you.

Instead, she used the key to lock Jack Dawson, her Jack Dawson, away from the rest of the world, away from this freefall of despair. He would be safe in her heart forever, feeding the flame of her spirit like he had done in life. Somehow, this didn’t comfort her as much as she wanted.

She felt bruised by this love that had left her and passed behind her, torn by this anguish that no human would ever have to face again through the end of time. Her eyes pried open, the once glittering gems reduced to dull, dead orbs that radiated, instead of freedom, entrapment, eyes that had once been so alive but now were nothing but shadows of something that might have been. Her skin was red-rimmed and pale, so pale that she not only took the spirit and pain of a ghost, but the appearance of one.

"Oars! Careful with the starboard side! Don’t damage the lifeboat against the ship!" From directly above Rose, the officer’s words seemed to swim from his mouth to the air around her, their sound warped and their meanings meaningless. Ever so slowly, Rose tilted her head up to shift her vision on the object next to her. Her neck screamed in suffering as it moved and her shivering that had yet to cease strengthened. It pounded with the beating of another’s heart that had been sewn into her own, with another’s pulse that given the rhythm for hers.

Rising out of the sea was a wall of black hull, rivets pressed together and paint chipped from the damage of salt. The portholes were cranked open and people hung out of some of them, wild hair blowing and eyes wide with horror.

They know no horror. They know nothing. They have experienced nothing.

A single smokestack belched cries for deliverance in the air, cries shrouded in the unearthly garb of smoke. On a plate of the ship, in peeling yellow letters, the name was proudly written–Carpathia.

Horrifying memories of a ship once a goddess and now a murdered queen thundered into every crevice of her mind and exploded into every corner, until she could find no sanctuary from herself. A jaded glimpse of what had once been Edwardian glory against a black sky, raised ‘til it blocked out the stars, poised to begin its deathly plunge to the ocean depths raided the last rays of hope that she had in her–which had already been so weak there was no point in treasuring them any longer.

As she forced sobs down her burning, inflamed throat, she could feel another time she had had tears on her cheeks, tears of joy washing away any pain she felt, tears of the gentleness of his hands and the softness of his kiss-swollen lips meeting with hers.

She was there again, in the moment, in the fiery passion that had enflamed them for what had felt like a second and an eternity all at once. Their eternity.

But even this eternity had to end and now all she had were shadowy traces of emotions that had burned brightly not even a day ago. Before, a day had seemed to go by so fast, like a scratch mark on the canvas of her life. Now it would never end. She knew that her curse was to be trapped in the sea forever, past death and before death.

Suddenly broad hands gripped her shoulders, nothing like the soothing, calloused ones of the man that had been the first and last to touch her in a way that made her feel like a lake of warm water. She was forced up. Blurrily, she could barely make out a man pressing a tarnished bottle to her stiff lips. A burning sensation overflowed her mouth.

The last time something had burned like that was two nights ago, in the whirling of Irish music and the stomping and clapping that chased away all social barriers and left nothing but the beat of the drums matching with the pounding of her heart.

The hurt that flooded within her at this memory made her immediately spit out the golden liquid. It dripped from the man’s thick brown coat and his matching hair. At first, his face contorted into fury, but seeing Rose’s pain-filled eyes he set down the bottle and wrapped her blanket tighter around her. Then he turned and hollered something to a crewman on the ship.

Ladders were unfurled and slings were dropped. She didn’t watch as her boat was slowly drained of people who still had their souls and minds. Instead she kept her eyes on the horizon, the circle boiling red with people slain and blood carelessly spilt.

Her eyes soon unfocused, seeing everything and nothing at the same time. Glimmering with a story of being lost and then being found before she was released, alone, into the destiny of a life that she could not live by herself.

Suddenly she let out a gasp of shock as the officer himself scooped her up out of the bottom of the boat. She wanted to forever lie on the bottom of that boat. Close to the sea, close to the salt, close to the tears, close to the sweat, close to an eternity that had denied her entrance. Her rigid self control shattered and without warning her body threw itself into convulsions. Her slender, bruised, betrayed form writhed mercilessly in the arms of this weary, death-streaked, guilt-ridden man that was the fifth officer of a queendom forever silenced. She would never let another hold her, even to help her like this, after whom she had loved...after him who had treasured her beyond Earth’s meaningless jewels, after him who had given her womanhood and freedom, after him who had seen, in everything, something past what anyone else could see without those haunting eyes, those melting ice chips of unbearable blue.

The sharp heels of her shoes irritated his skin. She saw beads of blood appear on his arm. Her hair, dry and again fiery red with hurt and suffering, spilled down her back as she tried desperately to allow herself to fall into those foreboding black and blue waves. They had taken everything from her. What more was her body?

She was despairingly laid down into the makeshift sling even as she kicked and fought against her very breath. The canvas was rough against her skin. Ropes were cranked and she was brought up the side of the ship.

All of the sudden she was hyperventilating. Flashes of blinding light were embedding in her very core, stinging her like lightning. Memories...painful, sweet memories...last time she was beside a ship...being lowered...black, black sky, black death, black sea...tears...little girls, father...distress rockets...Jack watching...eyes boring into hers...shame...guilt...torn apart...Cal next to him...shower of sparks falling down Jack’s form...scream from inside...love, bursting, overflowing, rendering love...stars...running...slamming of hearts...in his arms...weeping..."We’ll think of something..."

The attack was so unexpected that she gripped the fabric sides of the sling so as not to kill herself. The spliced edges were jagged and she held on so tightly that they sliced her fingers in some areas, leaving warm red stains on faded white.

It was such a relief to hurt herself, to give herself more physical pain, no matter how minor it was. To feel anguish with her body again.

The scream had been building up for hours. She knew it was coming. Not outwardly. No one would hear her. But like a hurricane it was released into her system, tearing and destroying everything in its path, invading and conquering, its sole goal to inflict as much guilt and sorrow as she could feel in her absent heart.

She became as limp as a rag doll as the sling crested the railing. Hands were pulling at her, dragging her, just like on Titanic, trying to get something out of her that she didn’t have. She was picked up but she had no strength to struggle. Everything was drained from her. She had gone from the only woman Jack saw to the bitter, empty, calloused woman she was now in merely moments. She didn’t recognize herself. Her outward beauty had not faded but, inside, a battle was raging like the very flames of hell itself.

"Do you need to go to the infirmary, miss?" she heard the question clearly, each word delicately pronounced as if the person was afraid of sending her into another seizure of madness. She looked up to see a burly middle-aged man staring cautiously down at her.

She could feel that she was weak and sore and hurt. For all she knew Death himself was about to take her into his arms. But she didn’t care. Right now she needed to be alone...alone with her regret and horror and terror and torment...alone with her vivid memories that branded her like melting metal...alone in the ice-filled, black, cold, lonely heart of that wild Atlantic.

Her shivering was more noticeable, controlling her body with wrenches that chilled her. But nothing could make her leave those emotions that were brutishly destroying everything love had given her.

She shook her head, the still icy tendrils of scarlet whisking around her face in the sea breeze with haunting mystery. The man seemed to be weighing something on his mind, whether to make her go or let her be. Finally he must have decided that the pain she had endured was too much to be added to. But he knew next to nothing about it.

He carried her a ways to the aft portion of the deck, his green eyes flickering about as if trying to do anything but see the absolute agony and inhuman anguish that had flooded like rain into her now tortured soul.

He set her down in a cold, wooden deck chair, trying to position her to make her comfortable. She didn’t move to help him. Comfort was a thing of the past that she couldn’t remember. He proceeded to wrap her in a thick steamer blanket, and she knew that even he, in his ignorance, could tell that warmth was what her life depended in. Then suddenly he was gone to try to help others that could never be repaired.

She sat shivering on the deck of this blaspheming ship, huddled in her guilt, her salty clothes sticking to alabaster skin. And, finally, she knew the nightmares had caught up with her and she had to face them. Finally, she closed her eyes.

The first thing she saw was another pair of eyes, chips of blue ice that blazed with passion and desire and love. They melted into limpid pools of calming water, flowing with pride and dignity she had never before seen in another human.

Slowly they faded away, that image of those orbs flanked by skin tanned from the sunshine and hair lightened by work. Suddenly, they were replaced by a Titan in her death throes, screaming in unabridged agony to be spared from such a horrible assassination, shrieking a final prayer to the Maker who promised her doom in those waters she was born to own.

The screeching of black steel that had been designed to withstand everything but destiny. The careening as human lives were silenced like the wind blowing out a candle. The cries splicing night air and sea peace into havoc, chaos, disaster.

And then the hands...hands that had, only hours before, been warm and tanned and full of life and ardor, stroking, drawing, caressing, probing. Suddenly they were colorless and cold, frozen in ice, in love’s blood, to her, waves of lifelessness pulsing where veins had once moved.

"Miss? Miss? This should warm ya right up...drink some."

Rose’s eyes suddenly shot open at this unfamiliar voice, and with the movement came the drenching, spirit-soaking tears, crystals pricking her face with diamond-sharp edges.

A stewardess stood in front of her with a tray balanced on her raw-worked hands. Brown hair streaked with gray hung in wisps around weary eyes.

Stunned, Rose could do nothing but watch as the woman held out a chipped mug to her that steamed into the cool, ocean-stained air. When Rose didn’t take it, she set it in her lap and moved on, clucking her tongue in pity.

Fury overwhelmed Rose’s heart. She didn’t want or need anyone else’s sympathy–especially that of someone who hadn’t been there, hadn’t felt it. She couldn’t bear to remind herself what that it was.

In pure instinct she drank the boiling hot liquid–and choked. It was golden broth, simmering on her tongue. She couldn’t taste it. Didn’t want to taste it. Only wanted a diversion from the feelings that were devouring her.

Eventually, she set the mug aside, not able to stand the relief that the warmth was bringing her. She deserved none. Not even this hard chair.

She kicked her blanket off of her, not caring about the chill. Somehow she got up, her legs near to buckling. She hadn’t walked on her own since before Titanic had plunged. Jack had pulled her, swam with her, held her. Jack...his name was the only balm to her hurt that she welcomed.

In some mystical way she forced herself to stand as steadily as she could, a result of intense shaking. With small, slow, painful steps she inched to the steerage section of the survivors. Where else did she belong? She belonged where he belonged, forever.

It was a struggle to get down those heavy metal steps into the stern area. A stoker covered in soot, his orange hair tousled and his scent thick with smoke, guided her safely to level deck again. She didn’t thank him, didn’t look back, but could feel her horror reflected in his own.

Like the flower of the dead, Rose collapsed to the floor once she had gotten far enough away from the lifeboat unloading area. She wrapped the one thin flannel blanket from the boat she had been in around her, pulling it over the crown of her head like a veil to keep her mind from seeing.

The screams that surrounded her were almost as horrible as what she had seen in the water. Again and again she heard murderous cries as women were confirmed widows, as their hearts were wrenched apart, as they frantically sought a loved one. A European was trying to describe her husband to a helpless officer, trying to find him, grasping and grasping for someone who wasn’t there.

"There’s got to be another passenger list!" The woman pulled her cloak tighter around her, staring at the man like she expected him to save her.

In turn, his expression fell and was emptied as he looked down at the clipboard again, obviously praying to see who she was looking for, trying to spare her the pain that could destroy her. But such a person was not found. "Ma'am...There’s no other list..." he trailed off, terrified to break the news openly but filled with guilt at hiding the truth.

"Well then, maybe he’s on another ship!" Doubt and guilt were staring this woman straight in the eyes, black, hard face to black, hard face, death dancing in their dilated pupils, wicked smiles dancing on evil lips.

The officer shuddered and Rose could tell that what disgusted her disgusted him as well. There were no other ships. These people had prayed and died in vain, without the assistance their screams had called for, neither from Heaven nor Earth.

"Ma’am...there aren’t any more–" he fell silent as the woman interrupted him, silent with respect and mourning.

"So then there’s got to be another passenger list!" She became white as a cloud. Her eyes became empty. Rose almost heard the breath of the Angel of Death as this person’s soul and spirit were swept from her trembling body.

It all happened before anyone could blink or pray or think. There was a loud thud and suddenly the woman lay in a heap on the floor, her shawl blowing in the wind. And Rose knew. She tried to pretend indifference, but she knew. Tears began to flow down her face again.

The officer cried out and fell to his knees, shaking the latter roughly, grasping at her and trying to force her to sit up. "Help! I need help over here! Oh God...why are you doing this? Why?"

Although he demanded an answer, he received none. A nurse came and picked up the woman’s hand, pressing two fingers to her wrist. Then she let it drop cold and lifeless to the wood.

Another victim that the sea had managed to grasp lay barren and forsaken in the mound of her despair. With almost businesslike efficiency the nurse quickly retrieved a body bag and closed it over the gray head.

The officer shook violently and stood, searching wildly around him, trying to get out of this hellhole of staring, black, dull eyes, of ice and sea and salt, of cold.

Rose turned away and gazed into space, reaching for her Jack to come back to her. And briefly she thought he had. Rough hands caressed her arms. The tickling of sweet nothings fell upon her ears. But then he was gone with a breath of the breeze.

"Jack!" she screamed, physically grasping into the air, trying to hold onto his shirt, his arm, his heart, anything she could get her hands on. It was too late. He was gone.

She crumbled inside and huddled closer to the floor, not looking, not hearing the fatherless children weep and shriek for their fathers, not watching the orphans stumble for a home that had vanished. She closed her eyes to the power of the ocean and fell into a lake of her misery, drowning and drowning...

Heavy footsteps broke her out of her entrapment. Immediately her insides jumped into her throat. Even though the person was behind her, she recognized that sound. So proud and pompous were those steps. The heels of dress shoes clicked loudly onto the deck. Starched clothing rustled with each move the person made.

Those were the sounds that she had dreaded and been terrified of for months. Those sounds had meant the Devil incarcerate was coming to ravage her inside. That the next morning she would have a bruise on her arm from refusing him and dried blood on her lips from fighting and a hurt pride from hardly escaping rape.

She turned cautiously, trying to shield herself from this person’s gaze. Immediately she saw what she feared. Caledon Hockley stood pacing on Carpathia’s deck.

Rage that had been encased in her grief suddenly bubbled to the surface of her brain. Self-control shattered. Anger disappeared and was left with all-consuming, irrational fury, like that of a tornado whipping across a prairie.

How could life rob her and treat her with such hate and horror? Goddamn it all. The horizon had disappeared beneath the raining evil of April 15, 1912.

She closed her eyes against brutal pain that overwhelmed her at the thought that Jack hadn’t survived but Cal had. That the pure had fallen to the wicked. That her Artiste, her love, her Savior, her soulmate had perished but the cold-blooded killer of freedom had evaded that horror of all horrors with nothing but a tear in his suit sleeve.

It all came pounding back, the black, black water bubbling over the head she had held to her, the body she had poured herself into, the hands she had given herself to. The spirit that had enflamed her own. She couldn’t describe the emotions that were flowing through her. She didn’t want to.

She was, again, handed a decision. A choice that would decide who she was and who she couldn’t be. She could easily reenter her life, the life of chains and false promises, the life of stinging pain and counterfeit feelings. The life of money and legalistics.

It could be so simple. If she could just offer her whole body, soul, mind, heart, and spirit to this man, a man who would crumple them all and throw them away, then she could have her old life back.

But then she remembered the Rose that had existed before. The suicidal Rose, the girl who had dreaded to wake up. She had prayed to go home to her father. She could still see herself, a face as white as chalk, trembling and shaking so hard she almost fell without wanting to. But Jack had saved her. She would be saved again. No matter what she had done, she didn’t deserve that slow, painful death. She did have a choice. She had an option. Jack had showed her that. Above everything else, Jack had showed her that. She would rather starve from food than starve from absence of love, which she now knew in abundance.

And then she realized something that made a prickly tear wash down her salt-crusted face. She wasn’t Rose DeWitt Bukater anymore. She could never be Rose Hockley. She was Jack’s Rose. Jack’s Rose...his flower, his love, his hope.

All inner conflicts vanished and she turned away, heart pounding, hiding herself from Cal. She heard him leave and then she realized what she had just done.

She had just unattached herself from Society. She was no longer a member of that group of murderers. No, now the Artist was inside of her, holding her, guiding her. She had just chosen a life that she did not know but had fallen in love with all the same.

Yes, she thought as her torture pulled her into a restless sleep. I am Jack’s Rose.

Chapter Twenty-Two
Stories