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Rose still felt as numb as she had in the water, even though she knew her physical body at least was no longer caught in its freezing grasp. It was difficult to wrap her mind around everything that had happened over the course of the last few days.
A week ago, she'd known exactly what her future held. She would be Rose Hockley, wife of Caledon Hockley, with every day of her life meticulously laid out before her by other people. She would bear his children and be his broodmare, the perfect wife who never let on that she was anything but exactly what he wanted her to be.
Then she had stepped on board the Titanic. She had let her control slip, and for just a moment she had considered ending it all. She had stopped pretending.
And she had met Jack. Jack, who was dead and gone as if he'd never existed. Jack, who had saved her life time and time again. Jack, who should be standing there beside her but wasn't, even though she hadn't let go. She'd held on, just like he told her to do, and he'd held onto her.
It just hadn't been enough in the end, holding on to each other.
With his face flashing in her mind, it made it easy for her to hide from Cal when she saw him searching for her. She couldn't go back to that life. She couldn't. It would kill her just as surely as the freezing cold of the water would have if she'd been in it for much longer.
Rose DeWitt Bukater had died on the Titanic. She wasn't that girl anymore. She had no idea who she was, but she knew that much.
She was Rose. Nothing more and nothing less. Just Rose.
*
It had been simpler than she expected to take on the identity of Rose Dawson. She played the role of a poor young widow, an American woman who was returning home with her husband after a whirlwind honeymoon in Europe that had ended in tragedy. No family. No friends. Not a single penny to her name. She told told them it had been just the two of them against the world, her lost husband and herself, and over the course of a few horrible hours it was suddenly only her left alone.
She claimed to have lost everything when the Titanic sank under their feet. Her papers. Her belongings. Her husband. It wasn't an uncommon story, so they didn't blink at the claim. So many people had lost everything, so what was one more in the grand scheme of things?
Rose was pointed towards the right people to help rebuild her identity, one that was built on a careful mix of lies and truth. Enough to be believable while still tugging at the heartstrings. They helped her get the paperwork that she needed to legally exist, never realizing that they weren't recreating something that had been lost but were building something new from the ground up.
Part of her felt guilty for the lies, but it was only a very small part of her. She needed to live, and this was the only way that she could. It was worth it.
For a scant few hours, she'd imagined a life with Jack at her side. They would slip off the ship together and disappear, traveling the world side by side and seeing the side of it that she would never have been allowed to see in her gilded cage. Perhaps they would have married, and she would have become Rose Dawson in truth. Maybe they wouldn't have lasted as lovers, and they would have amicably parted ways at some point. They were both still young after all. Anything was possible.
But now? At this point? There was no way of knowing what might or might not have happened. That possible world was gone, sunk beneath the waves of the Atlantic alongside the greatest ship known to man and almost three quarters of the people on board it.
Including Jack.
She was on her own, for better or for worse. She'd made her choice. Now she just had to learn how to live with it.
*
Rose saw Jack time and time again as she walked through the crowded city streets.
Every time she saw a little girl walking proudly as if she didn't have a care in the world, no invisible expectations holding her down, Rose saw Jack's face smiling at her in her mind's eye as if it was the younger version of her walking past and not a stranger. Every time she saw a young man selling sketches to raise money, she saw Jack's face juxtaposed over his. Every time she saw a young couple walking hand in hand, she couldn't help but picture the two of them instead, her and Jack walking side-by-side as they traveled the world like they'd talked about.
Time healed all wounds, or so they said. How much time would be needed to heal a wound so large? Years? Decades? Longer? Was a lifetime enough to heal from such a loss?
There was a part of her that couldn't help but think that Jack would never leave her, not completely. He'd saved her in more ways than one, even after his own death when he'd unknowingly given her his name to use. If it wasn't for him, who knew where she'd be? Who she'd be? If she'd be?
For his sake, Rose had to live.
No, that wasn't right. That wasn't true. It wasn't for his sake, not really. It was for her sake.
*
There were charities set up to help the poor survivors of the Titanic, and Rose had no shame in taking them up on their donations. She was starting from scratch, with no idea what the future might hold, but she wasn't foolish enough to think that she didn't need at least a little money if she was going to have a chance at staying afloat.
And so Rose took the charity that was offered to her, and then she left the city. She left the state. She left that entire part of the country. She turned her back on everything familiar and set out for the unknown with a ghost at her side.
Jack had told her stories of a world she had never even imagined, and she wanted to see it for herself. He was gone, and he wasn't coming back. Rose knew that much with absolute certainty.
But maybe, just maybe, Jack Dawson could live on within her.
It was almost like playing a role, pretending to be someone you weren't, and it turned out that Rose was quite good at being an actress when she put her mind to it. She embraced being Rose Dawson, a young survivor of an unsinkable ship that sank. She traveled. She explored. She saw things that she never could have imagined with her own eyes, and she loved her life.
Occasionally, from time to time, she almost thought she could see Jack standing beside her and grinning over the fact that she'd made it.
Rose lived. That was the important part.