#thatgentlemanhasclass

Isn’t that how you’re supposed cook it?

Cover for me, his brother said, work my shift please so I can skip out and go to the lake, he said. It's just a few hours at the store. A few hours, yeah. A few hours of reaching new levels of boredom that he previously thought impossible. The first hour of people watching and ringing up purchases went fine, but as the night grew on the customers got more predictable and less interesting. Matthew had the last shift of the day, and by then it was usually couples that had to run for condoms, or the newlywed running for icecream and pickles for his pregnant wife, and maybe one or two incredibly embarrassed guys purchasing a bottle of lube. Such was the fate of a small family owned grocery store. Alfred's family didn't own it of course, but the owners were as close to family as they could be without a marriage between the two families.

Sometimes he thought that his mom was trying to set him up with their daughter, but he soon let her know that he wasn't exactly okay with his mom meddling in his love life. Alfred wasn't okay with a lot of what his parents did in his life.

About half an hour from closing though, even the expected last minute runs and predictable night visitors slowed to a crawl. And about fifteen minutes from closing Alfred had started to doze off where he stood, only to be awakened by the ringing sound of the bell hung above the entrance. Shaking his head and checking his watch, Alfred glared back up at the customer. Who the hell came into a store this close to when it was supposed to close? 

Damn right.

thatgentlemanhasclass replied to your post: Alfred?

Never mind.

*sigh*

What?!

It had been a pretty regular expedition so far, a few spots of trouble here and there and a few communication errors between a lost ship of tourists explaining that no, this was not Proxima Centauri and they had missed that by about 4 lightyears. But by being a regular trip, it meant that Alfred spent a lot of time staring out the window being bored. The view was fascinating sure, the way the Earth just seemed to hang suspended in the sparkling velvet of space. Not the most poetic of descriptions but that's pretty much exactly how it felt until a piece of spacejunk floated by and ruined the whole idea. Usually it was just a random satellite, but every now and again pieces of his past would float by, dregs of the Cold War, little bits left of their childish rivalry scattered around the globe they almost destroyed. It ruined his mood like red wine on a wedding dress but like the occasional encounter was commonly harmless. 

Unless a giant chunk of ex-spy satellite got sucked into the engine, that was a big problem. But up until today it had never even come close to happening, scrambling into his spacesuit and prepping for an impromptu repair spacewalk a midst the blaring alarms and warnings. Alfred turned on the Earthcom and grabbed his tools before entering the airlock with a sigh. He hoped it would be an easy fix, Arthur would never let him live it down if he actually got into trouble out here and had to call in help from the International Space Station, which was going to be on the other side of the planet for at least another 45 minutes before it could get here and help. 

Flipping on the different life support systems, Alfred stepped out of airlock and hooked the leader to the pulley track in the panels of the ship that led to the left engines. It was a thermorotary thruster, specially made for and only found on his ship, to fix them meant he would have to clear the turbine first and then work on everything else in the combustion chamber. 

Swinging himself from handhold to handhold, Alfred made it the engine in a few minutes where he radioed a quick status report to earth before he set to work freeing the engine of mangled metal. He followed the standard procedure, checking his oxygen levels, and making sure to fling the metal away from the other engine. Everything was going fin until he tried to move the turbine, sparking leftover fuel from the satellite and causing an explosion mid-repair.

Even then his leader should not have broke, and there should not have been a large piece of shrapnel embedded into his life support panel.

All of these thoughts ran through his mind in the instant it took for him to realize he was floating in the opposite direction of the engine, ship attached, or why it felt like something was trying to suck his heart out of his chest. Fingers numb, Alfred dialed in the emergency override to the communications and send a shaky message to Earthcom before telling them what happened before asking them to pass a message through to Arthur.

"Hey, Arthur if you're hearing this, it's probably too late, but I'm sorry. You told me this would happen eventually and I didn't listen. I always thought I was invincible, but hey it turns out that dying isn't easy when you're probably not coming back and I just wanted to say that I love you and I'm sorry," he said barely above a whisper until the very end when it cracked and stumbled over a sob. Part of him didn't want Arthur to hear the fear in his voice but he had to get out the rest of his message before he ran out of time. The full impact of the situation finally hit him as he felt the suit growing colder. Even if the shrapnel hadn't pierced the skin he was still going to run out of oxygen and freeze to death in under an hour. How long had he spent talking to Earthcom? Half an hour? How much time left did he have?

"I wish we had more-" time Alfred thought, unable to make his mouth open and release the words. They could have had all the time in the world if he had listened to Arthur and stopped going out on missions, if he had stayed on the earth then he wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.

"Arthur-" Alfred started I again as he felt tears rolling off his cheeks as his awareness faded away into just what was physically around him, no longer able to see the globe he was drifting into.