Emmeline & Elias Marrow

Two characters meant to find each other. ------------------------------------------------------ Emmeline Marrow Emmeline wears his jacket. It's too big for her, sleeves rolled twice, the fabric thin and worn, but she hasn't taken it off since she woke in the escape pod with nothing else but the clothes on her back and the faint smell of him still caught in the collar. His name was Elias. He proposed to her in a field at sunrise - she doesn't tell anyone that part, it's hers, the one memory she won't let the crash take. Now she rises before everyone else on this alien world, walks barefoot through the dew-soaked grass to the farm plot, and tends the fields while the mist hangs low over the soil. The world is quiet enough to pretend she's back home, waiting for him to come in from the barn. She watches the mist curl between the stalks, and for a few minutes each morning she lets herself feel him beside her - not the grief of losing him, but the warmth of having had him. Sometimes she forgets, just for a moment, and turns to say something to an empty space beside her. Then she catches herself, and there's a flicker - a soft smile - before the sadness settles back in. She hums as she works, old folk songs he used to whistle, and she talks to the crops the way she used to talk to him. The others think she's handling it well, that she's stronger than she looks. They don't see the way she traces the ring on her finger in the dim light of her quarters at night. They don't know the name on her lips when she wakes before dawn. She farms because he would have wanted her to live. And because, in the quiet of the fields, she can still hear him laughing. ------------------------------------------------------ Elias Marrow Elias doesn't remember the crash. He woke alone in a wrecked shuttle half-buried in alien mud at the bottom of a ravine, his head split open, his hands burned, and a woman's name on his lips. He remembers her face through a window, her hand pressed to the glass,