Titanic

by Imperator Chiashi Zane

Sketchbook

“After all these years, I feel it still, closing around my throat like a dog collar. I can still feel its weight,” her eyes closed slowly, then opened again, “If you could have felt it, not just seen it…”
Rock Heart pressed his hoof gently onto a table, “That’s the general idea, dear.”
Steep Dive, ever the social outcast, laughed, “So, let me get this straight. You were going to kill yourself by jumping off the Titanic?” A loud guffaw split his face, “That’s great!”
Heart scowled at him, “Dive…”
Rose cracked up too, joining in, as he managed to stop long enough to speak again, “All you had to do was wait two days.”
Heart stepped out of Rose’s sightline and scowled at his watch. Hours have already passed. Its taking way, way too long, “Rose, tell us more about the diamond. What did Hockley do with it after that?”
“I’m afraid I’m feeling rather tired, Mr. Heart.” Fuzzy started pulling the wheelchair out the door.
“Wait! Wait! Can you give us something to go on here? Like who had access to the safe! What about this Lovejoy stallion. The valet? Did he have the combination?”
“That’s enough Mr. Heart. Let her rest,” Fuzzy pulled the chair out the door, the last sight of her being her hoof waving goodnight.
__
A massive hydraulic arm swung Mir Two out over the water. Beneath, Rock Heart and Filthy Rich strode along, “My company doesn’t like this. They’re pissed.”
“Filthy, Buy me some more time. I need time.”
“We’re pouring thirty-thousand bits a day into this venture, and we’re six days over. I’m telling you what they’re telling me. I might be the boss, but I still have to listen to them. And that’s what they’re telling me. The hoof is on the plug, and they’re starting to pull.”
Heart growled, “Tell the hoof I need another two days. Ty, Ty, Ty, we’re close. I can smell it. I can almost taste the diamond. She had it on her when…Now we just need to find out where it wound up. I just gotta work her a bit more. Okay?”
He turned away from Filthy Rich as the stallion withdrew his ever-present phone, and noticed Fuzzy standing on the deck. She heard most of what he said. Most of what Rich replied with. Calmly, he hustled her away from the action on the deck, “Fuzzy, I need to talk to you for a second.”
“Don’t you mean work me?”
“Look, I’m running out of time. I need your help.
“I’m not going to help you browbeat my hundred year old grandmother. I came down here to tell you to back off.”
Heart grunted, letting his desperation ooze into his words, “Fuzzy, you’ve gotta understand something. I’ve literally bet everything I have on finding the Heart of the Ocean. I’ve got all my dough tied up in this thing. My wife divorced me over this hunt. I need what’s locked in your grandmother’s memory.”
He rolled his hoof into the air, “You see this? Right here?” His hoof was empty, the frog flexing slightly as he clenched at air.
“What?”
“That’s the shape my hoof’s gonna be in when I hold that thing. You understand? I’m not leaving without it.”
“Look, Rock. She’s going to do this her way, in her own time. Don’t forget, she contacted you. She’s out here for her own reasons, Celestia knows what they are.”
“Maybe she wants to make peace with the past.”
“What past? She never once, not even once, ever said a word about being on the Titanic until two days ago.”
“Then we’re all meeting your gradmother for the first time.”
Fuzzy stared at him, trying to determine if he was bluffing, “You think she was really there?”
“Oh, absolutely,” he smiled, “I’m a believer. She was there.”
__
Dive started the recorder up again, Rose watching a video feed from the earlier dive, Snoopy moving along the starboard side of the hull, headed aft.
__
__
The next day, Saturday, I remember thinking how the sunlight felt.
Rose trotted down the promenade in the sun, brilliant sunlight illuminating her mane and tail over her crisp dress. She moved down the length of the ship with a purpose.
It was as if I hadn’t felt the sun in years. I was free, in a way.
She stopped at a gate, separating Steerage from second class. It had taken her long enough to slip away from her family. Colts and stallions stopped what they were doing to stare at the beauty in their midst.
__
In the social center, the General Room, everything was chaos. It was stark by comparison to the opulence of First Class, but has its own loud, boisterous nature. There were mothers with foals, colts and fillies running about yelling in several languages, and being scolded in several more. There are old mares yelling, stallions playing chess, fillies doing needlepoint and reading novels. Even an upright piano that one particular stallion in playing around on.
Three colts charged past, swinging shoes at a rat, trying to whomp it as it darted under benches. It caused general havoc, but Rose thought it was cute. Jack sat near the railing with the little filly he had been drawing the day before, sketching her funny faces in his book. Honor was struggling to communicate with a young female moose, sitting with her family on the other side of the room.
“No Italian? Some little Equish?”
“No, no, Norwegian only,” she is about to add more when Rose comes in, and her eyes track to the well-dressed mare. Honor turns his head and stares, instinctively kicking Jack, though his friend isn’t there to take it. Jack notices the gazes and turns away from the filly, looking where everyone else is, at Rose.
Everything goes silent in stages, as everyone notices her, and Rose freezes, suddenly very self-conscious. She doesn’t belong here, what was she thinking coming down here? Finally, she spotted Jack as he raised a hoof weakly into the air, and moved towards him.
The filly poked Jack, “Izzat the princess?”
Jack lowered his hoof and stood, smiling.
“Hello Jack.”
Jack’s friends stared in shock. Neither had believed his story, nor had they believed that he had actually been up close to his unreachable princess. It was like Cinderella’s glass slipper.
“Hello again.”
“Could I speak to you in private?”
Jack closed his sketch-pad and tucked it into his saddle-bag, “Yes, of course. After you,” he waved her out onto the promenade walkway. Jack glanced over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow at Honor, who was hoofing a bag of bits over to the filly. Never doubt the instincts of foals. He stepped after her quickly.
__
The two trotted side by side, a strange couple. The two passed ponies reading and talking in steamer chairs, some of whom glance curiously at the mismatched pair. Jack felt weird, walking down the aisle in his rough clothes, beside her finery. Both are awkward, for different reasons.
Jack broke the silence first, “So, I never did get your name last night.”
“Rose. Brilliant Rose Anwitt.”
“Quite a hoof-full there. I may hafta get you to write that one down,” another awkward pause.
“Mr. Darkson, I…”
“Jack. Call me Jack.”
“Jack…I feel like such an idiot. It took me all morning to get up the nerve to face you.”
“Well, here you are,” he gestured grandly, “Second Class.”
She smiled, “Here I am. I…I wanted to thank you for what you did. Not just for…For saving me. For pulling me back from the edge. But for your discretion.”
“You’re welcome. Rose.”
“Look, I know what you must be thinking. Poor little rich filly. What does she know about misery?”
Jack shook his head, “That’s not it at all. Not even close. What I was thinking was…What could have happened to hurt this filly so much that she thought there was no way out.”
“I…I don’t…It wasn’t just one thing. It was everything. It was them, it was there whole world. And I was trapped in it, like an insect in amber,” her voice sped up, “I just had to get away…Just run and run and run…And then I was at the back rail, and there was no more ship to run on. Even the Titanic wasn’t big enough. Not enough to get away from them. Before I even really thought about it, I was over the rail. I was so furious at everything. I’d show them. They’d be sorry!”
“Uh huh,” he looked her in the eye, “They certainly would be sorry. ‘Course, you’d’ve been dead. Just another piece of drifting debris in the ocean.”
“I…”Rose coughed into her hoof, “Oh Celestia, I’m such an utter fool!”
“That penguin, last night. Is he one of them?”
“Penguin?” Confusion wrote itself on her muzzle for a second, “Oh, Kale! He is them.”
“Boyfriend?” Jack’s heart sank slightly, though he felt he could still do something.
She sighed, and pushed her mane back, revealing a horn-ring with a giant diamond in it, though smaller than the one she had received the night before, no less impressive, “Worse, I’m afraid.”
Jack moved his head in close to look at the stone, “Luna, that thing’s huge. You’da gone straight to the bottom,” he moved his gaze to her slender neck, “How in Tartarus do you keep your head up? Is there like a rope or something hidden in that poufy mane of yours?” He stuck his muzzle in her mane, between his hooves, looking for a rope that wasn’t there. She laughed, only laughing harder as a steward passed by giving a glare at Jack, who clearly wasn’t on the right deck. Jack smirked through the mane at the steward, and Rose glared back, sending the stallion on his way.
“So, you feel like you’re stuck on a train you can’t get off, ‘cause you’re marryin’ this fella.”
“Yes, exactly!” she pushed a hoof up to get Jack out of her mane, almost whacking him on the muzzle as he pulled back of his own accord, “So don’t marry him.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“It is that simple.”
“Oh, Jack…Don’t…Please don’t judge me until you’ve seen my world.”
“Well, I will tonight,” he looked stunned by the way she ended the conversation so abruptly.
So surprised that he didn’t even notice her snatching his sketch-book until it was already moving away from him, “What’s this?”
“Just some sketches.”
“May I?” It was rhetorical, since the book was already opening in her magic. She rolled onto a deck-chair, laying the book on the raised head, between her hooves. Inside, she found many, many portraits. An old mare’s hooves, holding a scarf. A sleeping stallion. A father and daughter at the rail. Specifically, she recognized the filly as the one Jack had been sitting beside when she had found him, “These are really quite good, Jack. Really, they are.” His face was skeptical. His opinion of his own art, as with many artists, was self-critical.
“They didn’t think too much of them in Prance,” a couple of sketches slipped out, and Jack darted after them, though Rose caught them with her magic, all but two that he managed to grip with his wingtip. He snapped his wingtip in a flourish, “I just seem to spew them out. Besides, they’re not worth a damn anyway,” to emphasize his point, the flung the two he had caught over the edge. Rose snagged them out of the air and slid them back into the ratty book.
“You’re deranged!” She laughed and continued turning the pages. After flipping a couple more out of the way, she stopped, “Well, well…”
Nudes filled the next few pages. A series, many of them the same few mares. His work is amazing here, a sort of languid beauty, relaxed and calm. So real they seem almost alive. Soulful and strong, with expressive tails and manes positioned just so…Barely on the wrong edge of decent. They felt more like portraits than studies of the human form. Uncomfortably intimate to her. Her face began to heat up as she moved to conceal the book from other passengers. “And these ones,” her voice cracked, trying to be adult about it, “they were drawn from life?”
“Yup, one of the great things about Paris. Lots of fillies willing to take their clothes off,”
a momentary pause as he realized what he said, “Er, Mares.”
She stopped on one in particular, a unicorn with a lovely rendition of a…something Rose couldn’t quite identify…as her cutie mark. One hoof pressed to the mare’s chin, and the other lying casually at her flank, partially covering her tail, which was curled up making the picture more suggestive than analytical, “You liked this mare. You used her in several images.”
“She had nice hooves.”
Rose smiled, “I think you had a love affair with her…”
“No,” at Rose’s face, he raised both fore-hooves, “No! Just her hooves!”
Rose looked into his eyes, “You have a gift, Jack. You really do. You see ponies, the way they really are.”
“I see you. There it is, that piercing gaze again.”
“And?”
“You wouldn’ta jumped.”

Author's Note:

Another week, another chapter.

Comments

[Iroh Legoman]

Keep up the good work

[Imperator Chiashi Zane]

4521459
Thank you.