Titanic: Zarry Stylik

21- A promise

Song: Come Josephine in my Flying machine
In boat one, Sir Cosmo and Lucile Duff-Gordon sit with ten other people in a boat that is two thirds empty. They are two hundred yards from the screaming in the darkness.

"We should do something." Fireman Hendrickson says as Lucile squeezes Cosmo's hand and pleads him with her eyes. She is terrified.

"It's out of the question." Sir Cosmo responds.
The crew members, intimidated by a nobleman, hunch guiltily, hoping the sound will stop soon. Twenty boats, most half full, float in the darkness. None of them make a move.

Zayn and Harry drift under the blazing stars. The water is glassy, with only the faintest undulating swell. Harry can
actually see the stars reflecting on the black mirror of the sea. Zayn squeezes the water out of Harry's long coat, tucking it in tightly around his legs. He rubs his arms. His face is chalk with in the darkness. A low moaning in the darkness around them.

"It's getting quiet." Harry says quietly.

"Just a few more minutes. It'll take them a while to get the boats organized..."

Harry is unmoving, just staring into space. He knows the truth. There won't be any boats. Behind Zayn, he sees that
Officer Wilde has stopped moving. He is slumped in his lifejacket, looking almost asleep. He has died of exposure already.

"I don't know about you, but I intend to
write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all this." Zayn says, shivering.
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Harry laughed weakly, but it sounded like a gasp of fear. Harry found his eyes in the dim light.

"I love you Zayn."

He took his hand. "No... don't say your good-byes, Harry. Don't you give up. Don't do it."

"I'm so cold."

"You're going to get out of this... you're going to go on and you're going to make babies and watch them grow and you're going to die an old man, warm in your bed. Not here. Not this night. Do you understand me?"

"I can't feel my body."

"Harry, listen to me. Listen. Winning that ticket was the best thing that ever happened to me." Zayn was having trouble getting the breath to speak. "It brought me to you. And I'm thankful, Harry. I'm thankful." His voice was trembling with the cold which was working its way to his heart. But his eyes were unwavering.

"You must do me this honor... promise me you will survive... that you will never give up... no matter what happens... no matter how hopeless... promise me now, and never let go of that promise."

"I promise."

"Never let go."

"I promise. I will never let go, Zayn. I'll never let go." He grips his hand and they lie with their heads together. It was quiet now, except for the lapping of the water.

Fifth Officer Lowe, the impetuous young Welshman, has gotten Boats 10, 12 and Collapsible D together with his own Boat 14. A demon of energy, he's had everyone hold the boats together and is transferring passengers from 14 into the others, to empty his boat for a rescue attempt.

As the women step gingerly across the other boats, Lowe sees a shawled figure in too much of a hurry. He rips the shawl off, and finds himself staring into the face of a man. He angrily shoves the stowaway into another boat and turns to his crew of three. "Right, man the oars."

The beam of an electric torch played across the water like a searchlight. The torch illuminated floating debris, a poignant trail of flotsam: a violin, a child's wooden soldier, a framed photo of a steerage family. Daniel Marvin's wooden Biograph camera. Then, their white lifebelts bobbing in the darkness like signposts, the first bodies come into the torch's beam.

The people were dead but not drowned, killed by the freezing water. Some looked like they could be sleeping. Others stared with frozen eyes at the stars. Soon bodies were so thick the seamen cannot row. They hit the oars on the heads of floating men and women... a wooden thunk. One seaman throws up. Lowe saw a mother floating with her arms frozen around her lifeless baby. "We waited too long."

Zayn and Harry floated in the black water. The stars reflected in the mill pond surface, and the two of them seemed to be floating in interstellar
space. They were absolutely still, their hands locked together.

Harry's POV
I stared upwards at the canopy of stars wheeling above me. The music was transparent, floating. I felt peace. My face was surely pale, like the faces of the dead. I felt like I was floating in a void, in a semi-hallucinatory state. I knew I was dying. My lips could barely move as i sang a scrap of Zayn's song:

"Come Josephine in my flying
machine..."

The stars. Like you've never seen them. The Milky Way a glorious band from horizon to horizon. A shooting star flared.. a line of light across the
heavens. My hair was dusted with
frost crystals. My breathing was so shallow, I was almost motionless. My eyes tracked down from the stars to the
water.
Everything was in slow motion. The silhouette of a boat crossed the stars.
Men were in it, rowing so slowly the oars lifted out of the syrupy water, leaving weightless pearls floating in the air. The voices of the men sounded slow and distorted.

Then the lookout flashesd his torch toward me and the light flared across the water, silouetting the bobbing corpses in
between. It flicked past my motionless form and moved on. The boat was 50 feet away, and moving past me. The men looked away. And that's when it hit me.
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I lifted my head to turn to Zayn. My hair was frozen to the wood under me.

"Zayn." I touched his shoulder with my free hand. He didn't respond. I gently turned his face toward mine. It was rimed with frost. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully. But this time, he wasn't asleep. I could only stare at his still face as the realization woud go through me..

"Oh, Zayn." All hope, will and spirit left me. I looked at the boat. It was further away now, the voices fainter. I watched
them go.

I closed my eyes. I felt so weak, and there just seemed to be no reason to even try.
And then... My eyes snapped open.

I raised my head suddenly, cracking the ice as i ripped my hair off the wood. I called out, but my voice was so weak they didn't hear me. The boat was invisible, the torch light a star impossibly far away. I struggled to draw breath, calling again.

I struggled to move. My hand is actually frozen to Zayn's. I breathed on it, melting the ice a little, and gently unclaspsed our hands, breaking away a thin tinkling film.

"I won't let go. I promise." I released him and he sunk into the black water. He
seemed to fade out like a spirit returning to some immaterial plane.

I rolled off the floating staircase and plunged into the icy water. I swam to Chief Officer Wilde's body and grabbed his whistle. I blew the whistle with all the strength in my body. Its sound slapped across the still water.

I kept blowing as the boat came to me. I was still blowing when Lowe took the whistle from my mouth as they hauled me into the boat. I slip into uncosciousness and they scramble to cover me with blankets...

On the Carpathia, I watched, rocked by the sea, my face blank... seamen helping survivors up the rope ladder to the Carpathia's gangway doors... two women crying and hugging each other inside the ship.. just music, so gentle and sad, part elegy, part hymn, part aching song of love lost forever. I was coming into Carpathia, barely able to stand... being draped wtih warm blankets and given hot tea...

It was the afternoon of the 15th. Moe was searching the faces of the widows lining the deck, looking for me.

Don't be mad at me...i promise it'll get better