Her hands hurt; of that much she was sure. She looked at her fingers, and the joints in her hands now came to her as the roots of a gnarled oak might - if pushing up through the dry grass of late summer.
"Can this be me," she gulped, the sight tearing at her mastery of the moment. "These can't be my hands...can they?"
Yet, when she moved her fingers she felt overwhelming pain, and that searing sense of immediacy pushed aside all other awareness of the moment. She had been on the ship one moment, yet seconds later she had been with Charles in a train - but now...this? She was in a small compartment, at least it looked somewhat like a sleeping compartment, yet she was certain this was no train, and certainly not the ship she'd been on with her father. She sensed no movement here, nothing at all save for a distant humming, and the vaguest impression that air was being pumped into this small space.
Then, she felt more than heard a faint hissing sound - and as she watched a doorway slid open.
A man. She saw a man - in a wheelchair. He seemed familiar too, yet not quite - then she saw a naval officer was pushing the wheelchair, and, oddly enough, he looked familiar to her as well. She remembered the patch on his shoulder...
"Doctor Aubuchon?" the old man in the wheelchair said, his voice rheumy, tired and full of deep sorrow. "Claire? Is that you?"
"Do I...do we know one another, sir?" she asked, now completely taken aback by the man in the chair, and then the naval officer coughed gently before he looked away - as if she had said something embarrassingly untoward.
"Claire? It's me...Franklin?"
"Franklin?"
"Roosevelt? You don't recall anything?"
She drifted for a moment, reaching for a lost memory, then: "You were the president, weren't you? I remember something about that now." She paused and looked around the room again. "Where are we?"
The old man wheeled himself over to a porthole on the near wall, but there were no dogs on this port to keep a raging sea from pouring in, just a smooth oval of glass perhaps a foot wide, at most nine inches tall. She followed the old man, President Roosevelt, to the window and looked out...
...and fell away when she saw the planet spread out below. The surface that arced away beneath this ship, or whatever it was, was a mottled sea of flowing tans and mauves, and there was a vast ring encircling the orb, the sandy ring casting an immense, oblate shadow on the pulsing world below.
"What is this?" she gasped, "Saturn?"
"Yes, that's right - or so they tell me - but I'm still not sure I believe them."
"Them? Who's..."
She then felt an inrushing, overwhelming pressure gripping her skin, the unexpected force pushing in from every direction - yet within the pressure she felt entombed in pure, icy silence.
Then she saw the mountain. A vast horn in twilight, dark gray rock in swirling streaks of mist, and she saw an old man watching her - seemingly from within the mist. His eyes glowing with anger, the old man was looking right at her now.
"Where have you been?" the old man asked. "I was expecting you hours ago..."
Yet she didn't recognize the man, and before she knew what was happening she felt the relentless pressure on her skin again, then she was standing beside lookouts overlooking a vast deck - and she saw the iceberg, heard the forlorn cry: "Iceberg, dead ahead! Mister Lightoller..."
But this time the rudder bit into the sea and held; the great ship leaned perilously to starboard and then, suddenly, it seemed immediately clear to her that the ship was going to miss the iceberg entirely this time. She leaned with the ship and looked down into the sea, and she could see the great white spur beneath the rail as they passed- and again, she knew they'd escaped this time - that somehow the Titanic had escaped her certain fate, that somehow History had come undone...
She was breathing deeply now, and one of the men standing watch heard her and turned to face the sound of her fear.
"'Ere now, lass, what be the likes of you standing up 'ere now, and in your night clothes and all, eh...?"
She looked down at her hands and bare feet - and recognized her seven-year-old-self, then she felt the biting cold air nipping at her arms and legs...
"Did we miss it?" she asked, not really sure what to make of this disrupted night just now.
