AN: Written for CS AU Week.

It's the fall right after her funeral when she meets him.

He was sitting under the lone oak tree in the middle of the graveyard, head tilted up, staring at the spaces between the leaves. Oddly enough, she had found that finding out that he is just like her wasn't as surprising as finding him.

He regarded her with a peculiar gaze, something akin to awe and relief etched on the rings of blue in his eyes. His hair is dark, dancing with the strong winds, his hands buried under his thighs.

"You're still here?" he had asked.

"Where else would I be?" she had replied, for she knew nothing about how this works.

He had grinned at her and the blush that had creeped up on her skin was something she had troubles in hiding. His name is Killian, hers is Emma.

He, after his thirty years of living, has a lot of stories to tell. Of voyages on ships ("the sea is in my blood, love, there's nothing I can do about it"), and women falling head over heels in love with him (he says it with a waggle of his brows, and she couldn't help the amused chuckle that escapes her), of his brother, and his love. So when he asks her one of hers, she couldn't deny him.

"So what's your story?" he asks one summer day as they sit on top of his grave. The breeze whispers around them, warm and soft, and it reminds her of one of the greater things in life. For an orphan like her, something like this can be the most exquisite privilege. She never told him that.

"Story?"

"How you ended up here," he supplies, picking on the crack on the concrete.

She tells him of a car accident last spring, of how unexpected it was, of how she had been on her way back home after a long day at work. He looks at her and the emotions behind his eyes swallow her up like a whirlpool. A pang of pain shoots in her chest as tears begin springing at the back of her eyes. "You?" she asks in return.

"I… I went to sleep one night and I woke up here."

"You don't remember?"

He drops his gaze on the unkempt and uncared for splotch of soils around his grave. "I do. I was… my brother had just died… Milah – my – she… left. I… literally died of a broken heart, Emma."

If she leans over and touches her lips with his, if she kisses him because there's much more to him than his stories could ever tell, if she threads her fingers through his hair, well, she doesn't care anymore.

They are sitting on Mr. Olson's grave (his favorite grave because it's obsidian and embossed in gold, and it has his favorite quote on it: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain) when he asks, "Do you think we've met before?"

His voice is quiet in the mild gusts of the afternoon as it blows past them. The layers in his query digs in her heart – that if they had met in the past, would they have still felt the same way they do now? That if their eyes had met once, would they still have been as close as this?

She imagines an afternoon in the library, eyes meeting through the spaces between leaning, misplaced books on a dusty shelf – green and blue – a smirk and a coy smile. She smiles to herself because it could have happened, she might have forgotten it, but it could have happened and that moment could be their first meeting.

"We're in the same yard, aren't we?" she replies with a small grin in her lips. "Maybe in the library, or in the supermarket down 5th?"

"I don't buy anything from there," he shakes his head and meets her gaze, a whisper of a grin tugging at his lips. "I'd rather buy from the shop down 7th."

She laughs at that. "They have blue jello there."

"Exactly!" he exclaims, and the lightness in his tone makes him sound like a little boy. "They have blue jello there."

No one ever told them that when you're dead, you don't see the night, only the day. So when the sun glazes over them to the west and slides up from the east, she finds herself facing an eternity of a thousand suns.

She glances over to where he's standing, and he gives her an apologetic smile.

"Do you know why we're here, Emma?"

"No."

"I've seen it so many times in the past," he says, staring at the flower left on one of the graves near hers. She finds him almost all the time like this, staring at the bouquets left on every grave they walk upon. There's something sad and painful in the way he stares – later, she finds the name to it: longing. "Ghosts, they stay here until someone cries on their graves. Or until someone brings them flowers. We're still here because no one wants to visit us. Orphans don't exactly get the privilege of family visits."

She takes his hand and squeezes it in hers. He raises his head and finds the small grin plastered on her lips. "So we're stuck here."

"We are," he nods. They stay like that for a long time, letting the wind blow against them.

"Until?"

"I don't know."

She remembers a time when she was a little girl, she kept a notebook where she tallied her days in a new foster home. She would count until counting seems pointless, she stopped when hope had drained from her little heart. She had stopped counting the days in here, too, not even sure when she had ended. But not because of the same reason.

"Have you ever been in love?" he asks. And when he turns to meet her eyes, she finds that there's hope in even the strangest things.

"No, I haven't," she replies, giving him a soft smile. "But I think I'm beginning to."

She considers the possibility that she's exactly doing that as she faces another sunrise with him.

And it's strange, and odd, and peculiar, because she has never in her entire living life had ever fallen in love. But she finds that in the moment when her heart had stopped beating had she found a reason for it to be. And it's okay, people don't exactly get the opportunity to spend an eternity together like they do.