He remembered something about its importance, but not quite. Time here... simply was, hovering, coiling around him like one of the tendrils of the omnipresent fog.
Had it been days, weeks or years? The strange words appeared in his mind, with a few others, after a long time, but he didn't understand them, he only knew that he had no idea what they meant, had no replies. He simply was, existed, hovered in the fog, a part of it... his mind slowly coming to awareness, whispering that it hadn't always been like this, even as his being began reshaping itself into some form as the contours of his translucent body separated from the infinite, cold mist.
It had taken so long, he had been lonely, sad and freezing, but slowly, very slowly even as his body took shape, he started seeing lights transpiring through the thick, layered veil of fog encompassing him on all sides, hearing a vaguely familiar female voice, first only crying, then sighing and talking, pronouncing a name.
His name.
He learned to recognise her footsteps coming up the mist-shrouded stairway, their sound echoing off the walls of the low cloud which seemed to become solid every time she appeared, preventing her from reaching him, or even sensing his presence.
He tried to follow her down the stone steps at the beginning but couldn't, the wall of fog keeping him prisoner at the top of the stairway. He was not allowed through, he understood, he needed to wait... but for what? Even now, after all this time, he still had no answers.
At some point, the woman started bringing him things, leaving them on the ground not far from where the stairway ended. At first he couldn't touch them but eventually, even as he learned to see the grave-- his grave!-- upon which she left them, he became able to pick them up and keep them.
He knew they had belonged to him in some other place, other life-- a dog-eared book, a picture of a smiling couple in a silver a frame, a plain, golden wedding band...
'The things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end', he mused, remembering the line he once read. 'If not always in the way we expect.' His few earthly possessions finding him here, in the world beneath the fog, helped him reconstruct the memory of his past life... and death. And her... His love, the reason why he was still hovering in the mists.
He was waiting for her.
Suddenly, after all this time, he could recall the bright beam of light meeting him here, on the top of the stairway, so long ago, the light which he refused to walk through without her, because he loved her too much and was afraid that he would never find her again if he left her behind.
But now he didn't have to wait any longer, he realised, as he saw her coming up the stairs, and for the first time the mists parted for her, allowing her to find his opened arms. She wrapped her own arms around him as if to never let go again, and cried softly into his chest even as a new ray of light dispersed the fog around them, illuminating the second name appearing on the stone above his grave, next to his.
"I knew you would wait for me," she whispered, smiling at him through tears, taking his hand and pulling him towards the light without hesitation.
"I love you," he whispered before they dissolved into the light, becoming one for a wonderful, fleeting moment, to reshape on the other side, wherever the light took them, never to be separated again.
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