Legends

A Thousand Knives

"The water stung like a thousand knives tearing into the body." ~ Charles Lightoller, Second Officer

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"Help us! Someone help us!"

"Please, let someone come..."

"Just save one life!"

The voices, hundreds, perhaps a thousand, all cried out in unison. Their desperate pleas sounded across the clear night, echoing through the water in an eerie chorus. A chorus that struck the hearts of the ship gods and one ship in particular...

"I can't come back. I failed."

"Someone come help us!"

"I cannot!" A rumble shook her shattered hull, a sound that could be heard 2.5 miles above. She had done the best she could. She had carried them 3/4 of the way across the ocean when the icy beast had struck her, stripping her of her maiden virtues. She lasted nearly thrice as long as her designer had predicted. He had said one hour, she had floated for nearly 3! She had done everything she could!

Then, she remembered something Olympic had said to her, when they were born side by side in Belfast almost a year ago.

"A ship's first and only duty is to her people. Without them, there is no ship."

Her resistance began to falter and she felt her downward motion stall. Now that she had made her choice, reemergence was inevitable.

A redheaded girl broke the surface with a splash lost amongst the 1500 others struggling for survival in the water around her. The girl coughed, spitting up brine and blindly grabbed for the object nearest to her, a broken chair. Then her eyes opened, reveling them to be a deep green. She was in evening dress like her passengers, wearing a simple midnight blue gown, her bear feet treading the deep ocean around her as she trusted her existence to the strength of her arms.

Wiping her mouth with her wrist she noticed how silent it had become. A far cry from the panicked cries that had summoned her just minutes before. Death surrounded her on all sides. She could see it in the countless bodies drifting around her, held up by their white life vests. A pair of men both gripping flotsam like her, a woman with her dog, the animal frozen in the last struggle to free itself from its dead master, all pale, eyes slightless. One might almost mistake them for life size dolls. The culprit for their untimely and sudden demise was all around them. The girl could feel it. The 28 degree water felt like a thousand knives all poking into her body at once. For a human, it was unbearable. For a newborn kanmusu, just barely within the comfort zone.

Then a voice, rising above the silents like an eerie wail.

"Is anyone alive out there?! Can anyone hear me?!"

"H-here... I'm over here." The girl croaked, struggling to make use of her newfound voice. She gathered her strength. "I'M HERE! I'M ALIVE, I'M HERE!!"

A light shined into her face and she squinted her eyes against it. The relief was the first thing she felt as she was hauled into Boat 14. Then the crushing sadness. The agony of a kind that only a kanmusu could feel. The kind that comes from knowing your people are dead. She didn't attempt to stifle her tears.

A blanket was wrapped around her. "What's your name miss?"

Startled, she was momentarily lost for words and slowly looked up at the speaker. She recognized him as her fifth officer.

"Such a good man." She thought. Then she realized she hadn't answered him yet. Just as he was turning away she said "T-Ti-Tiffany." It was the best she could come up with on such short notice. No one could know her real name. She wasn't even sure she wanted to know her real name anymore.

In all, just six people were pulled from the water alive that night, Tiffany among them. Tiffany spent the time drifting before Carpathia arrived helping everyone within sight, going so far as to give up her own blanket to a child. Her actions that night were cause for people to take notice and for many years afterwards they shared stories of the kind woman with skin as pale as the dead and eyes as green as the Irish moors. Many wished to thank her for undoubtedly her actions had saved lives but they never could for shortly after arriving in New York, she disappeared. People tried to track her down but it was like the woman known simply as Tiffany had never existed. Eventually the stories were dismissed as hallucinations or post-disaster metaphors but they still remained, confined within the tight knit circle of family and relatives. Until one day, a war 100 years later would bring them back into the masses' eye.