I'll Only Jump if You Jump With Me

Light

The glow fell across Rose's neck and chin, the faint light pulling dull shadows over her ice-white face. Blurred and shifting voices echoed distantly from ages away, across the water and between the stars. Blurred and shifting lights moved through the sky; or no-the stars in the empty darkness above were wavering in the liquid darkness below.

It was disrupting the cold and cutting through the silence, and as the darkness fell away in places, the slightest trickle of hope pushed through the numbness in her chest.

There was a maybe.

She forced her limbs to move, battling the unfeeling heaviness that weighed on her entire body. The little glimmer of hope within her struggled against a part of her that begged to just lie down down and let a heavy, endless sleep take her away, to a warmer place, a place without the pressing silence of this too-still water, a place where-

Jack.

She moved his wrist a little bit against the board.

"Jack," she murmured hoarsely. Her voice ran thin, as though she hadn't used it in years. Maybe she hadn't.

Rose dragged herself half upright. The ice in her hair made a hollow scraping noise against the door, as though everything about her was as frozen as the berg that had torn open the Titanic beneath their feet.

She shook his wrist, a slight movement. 

"Jack."

A whisper, no more than the accidental hollowing of the wind.

She shook his arm harder, repeated his name again. He stirred. He was still with her. He was here.

His eyes drifted partially open, their blue shocking against the dark circles that framed them.

"Rose..." her name, slipped between his lips like it was something precious. His voice coarser than her own, coming from far away. Everything seemed immeasurably distant, as though it all had to get through a tiny space to reach her.

He was here, but now it was up to her to save them. He couldn't dodge bullets, or fit a sharp key into the gate, or pull her to air to keep her from drowning. It was all on her now.

The echoing was floating away now, and the lights were drifting past. Insubstantial and waving, like summer fireflies. 

It was all on her.

She could see the shapes used to be moving, but weren't moving anymore. They were quiet now. They hadn't been quiet before, but now the lights were here and it was too late for them.

Rose could see that most of them were held above the surface by their lifebelts, but some were floating on fragments of debris, like she was.

There was a man, floating on a pile of chairs.

She leaned back, using her weight to shift Jack onto the door with her. He tried to struggle, but he was even weaker than she was, and his chivalry was no mach for her desperation. Water began to run over the raft as Rose pulled his shoulders and then chest over. It couldn't support both of them and it wobbled, shifting under two inches of water.

"Rose. You can't. We'll both freeze," he choked. She took as deep a breath as she could and let go of his hand, taking hold of his wrists instead. 

"Do you trust me?" she already knew the answer, because without it, she would have been gone already, at the bottom of an ocean as cold as this one. 

She thought she saw him nod, although it may have just been his shaking. Her arms shook as she kissed his hands, and without another word, she rolled into the water.