Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cassian
“James!” Cassian screamed in horror as he watched an enormous swell of water slam into the man he loved, but before he could even begin to think about how to help, the water reached him, too.
Cassian only had a fraction of a second to brace himself for the impact. Even though he was in a relatively stable position—his knees bent, his muscles tense—nothing could have prepared him for either the force of the sea or the frigid cold.
Water slammed into him like a battering ram, the power of the ocean so magnificent that even though Cassian had seen it coming, he hadn’t a chance to remain on his feet.
Then, once he fell, he was pierced by the sharp cold of the ocean.
Every inch of him was on fire but frozen at the same time.
For a moment, the pain was so strong that Cassian couldn’t even think.
His mind was blank, empty even of half-formed thoughts and images.
All that existed was a bright, white, blinding light.
And then, just as suddenly as Cassian had been pulled under, he resurfaced.
Bursting out of the water, Cassian gasped for air.
At once, his senses were assaulted with another horrible facet of his new reality: the thunderous roar of other people’s screams. All around him, passengers and crew members were thrashing in the water, crying out in fear or agony or both.
Their voices filled Cassian’s head, the sounds a crescendo that rang in his ears and made it impossible to think logically.
Instead, Cassian only kept afloat by instinct—sweeping his limbs back and forth somewhat haphazardly—as his mind worked to adapt to the terrifying situation he’d found himself in.
Finally, when both the pain and the noise became slightly less all-consuming, a terrifying realization hit him, and his head whipped back and forth as he began scanning the water for his perfect steward.
He silently thanked God that he’d given James his lifebelt.
Yet even after several frantic moments searching, Cassian couldn’t find him.
The very real possibility that James might not have made it or that they might never find each other in the cloak of night—the only light a sickly reddish orange glow from the nearby sinking ship—caused Cassian’s heart to crack, and the resultant pain was worse even than being immersed in the frigid Atlantic waters.
He kept his arms moving, kept looking around, kept searching, still on the very edge of panic.
But nothing. James was nowhere to be found.
Desolation hit him like a fierce wave, and Cassian had the fleeting thought that maybe he ought to let himself slip beneath the surface.
Then, just as he closed his eyes and let his arms slow their desperate paddling, he heard James’s voice calling for him, echoing with clarity above the others like a beacon of hope.
Whirling toward the sound, Cassian spotted James immediately mere feet from where he was.
“James!” Cassian called back.
He swam over, somehow forcing his limbs to move even though they still burned from the chill of the icy seawater.
“James!” Cassian cried out a second time.
James was still calling out Cassian’s name, too, though the man seemed not to be able to hear Cassian in return.
When Cassian reached him, he placed a hand on James’s shoulder.
James’s entire body spasmed, and he whipped around to face Cassian, but before Cassian had a chance to speak, James practically leapt on him and pushed him beneath the ocean’s surface.
Cassian’s blood spiked with fear, and he thought that he might meet his end right then and there.
Somehow, however, he managed to reflexively shove James off of him.
Quickly, Cassian bobbed to the surface, and the first thing he heard when he reemerged, spluttering out a mouthful of seawater, was James calling out for him again.
“Cassian!”
Cassian took hold of both of James’s shoulders this time and then, with every bit of strength he had, he shook the man once, hoping that he could break through the blinding white light of panic and pain that had obviously been clouding both the steward’s vision and his mind.
“James!” he shouted. “Dammit, James, I’m right here!”
James blinked a few times.
“Cassian?!” Inhaling a shaky breath, he looked into Cassian’s eyes, and then he reached out and touched Cassian’s cheek. “Oh, God, Cassian, it’s you, it’s you.”
He released a single sob, and then his face froze in a pain-stricken expression, as though he was crying but no sounds were coming out. Cassian cupped his cheek.
“I’m here, James,” he said softly. “I’m here.”
James seemed to bask in his care for a moment, shutting his eyes. Cassian kissed their foreheads together but struggled to maintain contact for more than a couple of seconds because of the constant need for him to keep treading water.
His chest ached as he broke away.
“Cassian, this is it for us,” James lamented. “It has to be.”
“No,” Cassian said, his voice harsh. “No, I refuse to let this be the end.”
“But wh-wh-what c-can we do?” James said, his teeth beginning to chatter violently. “I’m so c-c-cold, and the ship, she is g-going.”
Cassian began to look around, scanning the area for anything they could use. “We have to find something to float on.” He searched some more. “Where in God’s name is that lifeboat I was working to flip?”
After a moment more, he spotted it, closer to the area where the ship’s bow was submerged in water. Even though it was still upside down, men were scrambling onto it.
“Look! James, there! It’s our lifeboat!” he shouted, pointing. James looked too, following Cassian’s finger. “We have to swim to it! Before it’s too late!”
Shutting his eyes once more, James shook his head. “I can’t! It’s too c-cold for me.”
“You can and you will,” Cassian ordered, only barely keeping his own teeth from chattering. He took hold of the fabric-covered cork shoulder pad of James’s lifebelt and pulled. “Let’s go. Follow me.” He pulled once more. “Now!”
Mustering all of his strength, Cassian began to swim while James floundered in the water beside him.
“Remember what I showed you!” Cassian instructed as he moved his arms through the freezing water. “Keep your fingers loose. You can do this, James!”
All of a sudden, there was a loud crack like lightning or a gunshot.
Cassian swiveled his head toward the ship.
A second crack sounded out, as loud and striking as the first. Only then did Cassian see what it was. Attached to the closest of Titanic’s four funnels were thick, black cables, the ones that provided the funnels themselves with much of their stability.
And they were snapping.
One by one.
Crack!
The sound was still echoing when the funnel began to sway back and forth.
And Cassian had the harrowing and clear thought that it would fall.
He looked at the water exactly below where the funnel was—the area most likely to be in the funnel’s future path.
People were swimming there. Lots of them.
Cassian clenched his teeth, cringing, though he only felt a relatively small pinch of sorrow for them over their seemingly inevitable fate.
Until he recognized Jacob Calbot in the crowd.
“Jacob!” he called out the instant he saw his friend, but as Jacob’s name left his lips, there was another horrible series of cracks, the sounds exploding into the air. And then, the funnel began to fall.
Cassian could only watch in horror as the funnel crashed into the water, crushing the people who were swimming beneath it, Jacob included.
He was still staring at the funnel, transfixed and mesmerized, when the ocean rose up in front of him. A series of waves from the funnel knocked both him and James backward, disorienting him.
When Cassian finally righted himself in the water, he was relieved to see that he hadn’t lost James.
“Cassian! Oh, God, those p-poor people!” James said.
Cassian didn’t have that heart to tell him that he’d seen Jacob among them.
“I know,” he said instead, and he quickly pushed the thought out of his mind. He could face all of his inevitable sorrow once this nightmare was over. Right now, he needed to focus on finding that Goddamned lifeboat.
Starting to shake now himself, Cassian looked around and almost cried with relief as he spotted it only a couple of swim strokes from where they were. Hope filled his chest, enlivening him as nothing had since he and James had been thrown into the sea.
In a horrible twist of fate, the same catastrophic event that had ended Jacob’s life had perhaps made Cassian and James’s survival still possible.
Cassian began swimming for it. James followed, successfully moving forward in the water with his slightly improved swimming strokes.
It only took them a brief moment to reach it. But in that time, so had others.
Through the scrambling and thrashing of the men around him, Cassian worked to pull himself up onto the overturned boat.
Just as he nearly got a foothold, someone shoved him back.
James, too, reached up, but then someone inadvertently smashed his fingers with their foot as they climbed atop the raft.
Soon, the overturned boat was nearly full with what seemed like over twenty men balancing on it.
Together, Cassian and James swam over to the back, keeping to the rightmost side of the boat, where there was enough room for one more or maybe two.
“Come on, come on,” a man said back there, extending his hand. “Hurry.”
Cassian moved to grab it but then realized that whichever of them took that next-to-final spot would be mostly out of the water, while the other might have to cling to the structure. Or else kneel with both of his legs submerged.
It had to be James.
“You go,” Cassian said to James.
“But—”
“It’s not a request.”
James took the man’s hand and let himself be hoisted up.
He knelt on the boat to the right of the keel.
Immediately after becoming settled, James twisted around and extended his hand for Cassian.
Cassian let himself be pulled up, too, though the water came up to his waist when he was on his knees.
James’s calves and feet were still submerged as well.
Together, their weight had caused this part of the overturned boat to become even more submerged in the freezing water.
Hopefully, though, it would be enough for them to survive.
“Did I s-s-swim all right this t-time?” James asked him.
Cassian huffed a half-laugh. Cognizant of the fact that the catastrophic event unfolding around them would mean that others on the boat shouldn’t take issue with his being physically close with James, Cassian wrapped his arms around the man he loved and pulled him close.
“P-p-perfectly middling,” he said.
He squeezed James over the lower half of his lifebelt.
Screams had been ringing out all around them, but before that moment, they’d only been a constant roaring hum in Cassian’s ears, one that carried little emotional resonance overall, especially while he’d been working to reach the boat.
Now, though, thanks to both the relative safety of their overturned vessel and the lightness of that little exchange with James, Cassian was able to finally hear them and to register them for what they were—the fearful screams of people facing their final moments.
Grief landed in his stomach like a stone.
Cassian was still reeling from it when another series of strange, thunderous sounds reached his ears—pops and cracks and booms. He needed a few moments to think before he realized what they were and what might have been causing them.
Titanic’s structure seemed to be failing.
Cassian looked up at the ship in horror, and exactly then, something unbelievable happened: she seemed to break in half.
After a second of stunned stillness, he blinked a few times, though he couldn’t seem to fully comprehend what it was that he’d witnessed.
Over the next little while—the shrieks and screams of other people and the ear-splitting roar of the snapping ship reverberating in his head—Cassian stayed frozen, unable to even breathe.
And then, when there seemed to be only one-half of Titanic left floating in the water—only half of all of her splendor and beauty remaining above the surface, seconds or minutes from being lost permanently to the Atlantic—Cassian let out an exhale and hugged James closer.
“Dear God,” he whispered.
Aboard the half of the ship that remained above the waterline, clusters of people were clinging to each other and to the railings, swarms of passengers and crew members writhing and moving around, reminding Cassian of insects in a nest, though they were barely visible in the darkness.
Intermittently, people plummeted into the water below, sometimes seeming to hit pieces of the ship mid-fall.
Bile climbed up Cassian’s throat as he continued to watch the scene unfold.
Slowly, the ship began to disappear beneath the ocean, bit by bit. Every second that passed, the roaring screams of Cassian’s former fellow passengers became louder. Soon, the sound was so powerful, so profound, that he found himself wondering if he’d ever experience silence again.
Someone at the front of the lifeboat called out, breaking through the noise.
“Don’t permit others to come aboard! Already we are too full!”
Craning his head, Cassian could see that their overturned vessel was, indeed, full.
Some people—those more squarely in the middle and even the officer in the front—were standing, balanced precariously on their feet to keep as much of themselves out of the water as possible.
Others were clinging to the structure, their bodies still mostly in the water, while the rest, like he and James, were on their knees.
Cassian let out a long breath of relief, even as his insides violently twisted with guilt. Unfortunately, their little lifeboat could not fit more people, neither could it likely bear more weight.
Still, he and James had made it on board.
Though the horrifying screams of hundreds still struggling in the water continued to echo in the night.
And Cassian knew not when or whether help might ever come.