(A/N: I'm posting this in honor of the 104th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic. Tonight it will hit the iceberg and begin it's journey to the bottom of the ocean. May all of the victims and survivors rest in peace)

April 15, 1913

Rose Dawson shivered against the cool night air as she sat on the pier, gazing up at the star-filled sky. She had finished work hours ago. Which was good. Now she didn't have to struggle and pretend that this was just some ordinary day. She could pretend that she had never sailed on the unsinkable ship Titanic, that she had never met and fell in love with a wonderful, kind artist, just to lose him in the end. Now that work was over, she could sit here and remember and drown in her grief. It was after midnight. She did not know how long after, but she knew the moment Jack had slipped away from her was fast approaching. It was a moment she dreaded.

She closed her eyes against the memory of that moment. The feeling of his frozen hand fused to her own. The ice framing his hair and beautiful face, pale and peaceful in death. The solid thump of his frozen fingers against the door as she freed herself from his deathly grip, and the last vision of him disappearing into the depths of the ocean as she released him, making one last promise to push forward with her life.

How disappointed he would be if he could see her now.

It wasn't like she hadn't tried to move on. After they had docked, she had avoided her mother and Cal and headed in the opposite direction from the first class passengers, ignoring the vouchers given to stay at the grand Waldorf-Astoria. Instead, she accepted the invitation to stay at a house for women and the offer of some hand me down clothes. They were nothing fancy, but it was room and board and warm clothing until she was back on her feet enough to move on. She stayed in New York for only a month, ignoring the necklace she had found in Cal's coat, but using the money she had found to head off to California, thinking of Santa Monica, the one place she knew that Jack had once been.

In Santa Monica, the first thing Rose did was get a job. A small cafe owned by an elderly woman that decided that she looked like a good person, good enough to give a waitressing job to. After that, she had rented a small room. When she hadn't been working, she had been looking for an acting job and found one at a small theater. Thankfully, the hours worked out so she could keep her waitressing job in the day and her acting job in the evenings. Somewhere between jobs, she managed to visit the pier and did all the things that she and Jack had talked about and that was it. That was where she ended fullfilling her promise to Jack. All of her time was spent working and when she wasn't working, it was thinking of Jack and mourning the life that they could have had together, a life that was never to be.

She closed her eyes against the pain in her heart. She couldn't go on like this. It was killing her just as much as staying in her former life would have. The constant ache of Jack's absence, it was never leaving her and it was driving her to distraction. It had been a hard, lonely year, and by all signs it was nowhere near an end.

She opened her eyes, thinking that the time must be now when Jack had slipped away one year ago. She really had no way of telling the time, she was just going by gut feeling. She looked up at the sky and watched as a shooting star appeared in the night sky. It looked like the star that had appeared in the night sky when Jack had slipped away, when she had really became alone in the world. She also remembered what he had said about shooting stars and that you were supposed to make a wish upon them.

Following the star's path, she made a wish. It was an impossible wish, one that had no chance of coming true, but she wished for it anyway.

I wish that I could go back and save him somehow. I wish I could save Jack. Stop him from boarding that ship or some other way. I wish I could just go back and save him...

"Wishes can be tricky things. You have to be careful," a strange voice spoke up from beside Rose. She frowned as she found an elderly woman wearing some kind of colorful hairscarf and heavy makeup sitting next to her.

"Pardon me?"

"You just made a wish, didn't ya? I hope it was for something that you really want, because wishes have a funny way of coming true," The woman winked with a knowing smile. "Sometimes, the wishes can turn bad. Sometimes people can regret their wishes."

Rose sighed and looked at the woman with the deepest sadness in her eyes. "I would never regret mine."

"Think about it, love. Are you sure?"

"I am quite positive," Rose sighed, wishing that her dream was one that could come true. Sighing, she stood up from the bench, beginning to shiver from the chill of the early morning air. She had felt colder, but it was still rather uncomfortable.

"Good..."

Rose frowned as she turned to the woman, just to find no one there. That was strange. First she hadn't heard the woman arrive and now she definitely hadn't seen or heard her get up and leave. Maybe she had just been too focused on her own grief to notice anything. Another sign that it was time to return home.

Taking one last glance at the star-filled sky, the shooting star long gone, Rose headed for home. She had a early day tomorrow and she would need all the sleep she could get.