I didn't say if this was an F or NF prompt, because I don't know yet. I am literally just dumping onto the screen, via the cat who is determined that there is room on my lap for the laptop and him (there is if I keep my wrists firmly holding the laptop down)
So.
NF
This is the closest I have ever been to giving up teaching. I am here every year, at the start of May, hating myself, hating the job, loving my children, loving my colleagues and hating SATs with a passion. An utter passion.
And then my son came down and distracted me and I lost the thread of where I was going.
So.
F
This is the closest I have ever been to the sun, thought Della, and this is too damn close. She slapped the control panel again, and watched as the array of lights flickered on, tempting her brain with hope of engine recovery, and then flickering off again. Nope. Nothing.
Stupid, ancient, heap of junk machine, she thought angrily. On the other hand, the temp gauge had never worked, so there was every chance she wouldn't know when she was about to die. That had to be a bonus, right?
There was an alarming juddering from the left side of the ship, and she glanced out of the port side window in time to see the leading edge of the wing begin to glow white hot and lengthen with the heat, thinning as it did. That wasn't going to go well.
She punched trim controls into the computer, arguing with the auto-flight that was insisting that everything was fine. It always insisted that. It had started insisting that when they had got caught in the fish storm on Rigel 4, and a shark had busted through part of the wiring in the nose cone. It had carried on insisting that through the dust storms, the ice storms, another fish storm, and everything else that that planet could throw at the pair of them until she had saved enough fuel to get off the place and out into space again.
The fish storm was the worst though, she thought absent mindedly as she rerouted the last of the power into the engines. The fish stank. The lights dimmed. The air recycling unit slowed, but not stopped. She knew that the immediate feeling of the air thickening was psychological, but she accepted it and moved on to finding anything she could that would slow her descent into the burning orange of the gaseous ball beneath her.
She had one chance.
One.
It was outrageous, and stupid, but it was dying with a sword in her hand and not whimpering on her knees, and so she had to take it.
It came.
She was prepared. The shields were strengthened underneath her, what was left of the wings was tilted at the right angle, and although she'd be going backwards, this would be the ride of her life.
She watched the screen as the bubbling increased in that area of the sun and then WHOOSH!
An enormous solar flare erupted from the surface of the sun, plasma shooting towards her. She laughed on the edge of hysteria as the plan worked, and the ship rose up onto the front of the wave, reaching the lip, balancing there, and riding the plasma away from the sun and certain death.
Too close to the sun, by far, but it had been the only way out.
