A gut-wrenching snarl echoed across the ship, a hideous thing of climaxing intensity. The lone crew member tore his eyes away from the untamed planet below, frantically sprinting to the ship's core. As he ran through corridors and airlocks, his mind raced: "boarders? a core meltdown? piarates?" He threw open the final door, only to stagger backwards in shock. The ship was tearing itself in two. The signs had been obvious, he realized. Hairline fractures becoming ugly scars over years, misalignments buckling under the strain, an unstable situation likely to fail. The halves of his ship were incompatible, not meant to be stitched together, and now they were failing at last. With a final roar, the spacecraft became two. Tim sat down and wept.

Susan stared out of the window, where her son wept in the lobby of Manfred and Smith, a NASA cap pulled across his face.

"How can we do this to our Timmy?" She murmured. Mark turned to gaze beside her. "It's breaking his heart," she continued, "couldn't we have left him with Roger or..."

Mark cut her plea off. "We both know that we can't protect him from this. It's ugly, but nobody can hide from it."

Susan and Mark's eyes locked, seven years of marriage between them. They would do this last thing as one. Together, they strode into the tastefully decorated lobby of Manfred and Smith, and embraced Timmy.

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Thanks for reading my first WritingPrompts submission! I'm not a very good writer, but I hope I can inspire more talented people to write some better stuff. Let's make this tribe awesome!