A/N: So it's been running around in my head since I read the book. I figured, might as well, right? Let me know what you think.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, as usual.

I hardly remember being alive, truly alive. I died in 1904, of fever I'm told, and spent the many years that followed in absolute darkness. There were sounds of life above me, but they were muffled, so very far away, and so much dirt between. If I listened carefully, I might hear the various clicks and shuffles of bugs and worms burrowing through the dirt around my wooden coffin.

No one really knows what makes a soul cling to the body. I couldn't even say what it was that kept me from moving on through the afterlife. I knew I was dead, incapable of movement or sound, and yet there I was, trapped in a decomposing body, in a gradually rotting casket, under six feet of dirt and what I'm sure was the cheapest headstone my penny-pinching brother felt was enough to serve his familial duty.

D'nay brought me back to life, a reanimation spell, she called it. Considering that I hadn't believed in any such nonsense before I'd died, it was passing strange not only to find myself a zombie, but utterly under the control of a witch. Had it been at all possible, my puritan ancestors would have been rolling in their graves to see what I'd become. For me though, I was thankful just to be out of that hole and active again, even if it was a hundred years out of date. To see and touch and talk and move! I could even eat if I wanted to. It was as close to life as someone like me could be.

Then I met her. Irene. Lovely long hair, dark and silken green, smooth and pale green skin, a voice as old as the earth and young as the newest baby. Smart and silly, born of fantasy and grounded in reality. She was a tree and she was a woman. A wonderful mix of contradictions with a punny sense of humor and no sense of smell. For a man as dead as I was, that last bit especially made it easier for us to become friends.

Perhaps one day we'll be something more. For now, I am content to nurture this secret emotion. It has been many long years since I died. But with this love growing inside me, I can almost remember what it felt like to be alive.