Notes: WARNING! Major character death. This is my first shot at a reincarnation AU.

I didn't want to die caged by walls under the dim light of my room. I'd much rather my soul ran free under the golden light of the summer sun, a sun that would beam down on me on my ninetieth birthday. I knew my time had come.
I hadn't been able to do my duty to the County, what I'd been born to do, for nearly five years now but I liked to believe I'd lived a good age and a good life for a spook. I didn't want to die surrounded by the tears and grieving faces of the twelve spooks who had completed their apprenticeship. The spooks I'd taken on as apprentices over the years.
Oh no. I, Tom Ward, wanted to die in peace, alone, where I'd most likely see my beloved, my Alice again. She'd passed away ten years prior with my hand holding hers. She had left after making me promise that I would keep fighting.
But I couldn't, at least, not anymore. I had told myself countless times after my retirement that I'd fulfilled my promise to her. I did keep fighting…right up until my bones had just worn too thin to weather the cold, my mind too absent to stay on task and my limbs aching too often to continue with my trade.

So, there I was, moving to sit under the shade of the tree nearest the bench where I'd had many talks and theory lessons with my old master and my own apprentices. It was also where me and Alice had shared many rare, quiet, special moments.
As I laid there in wait for death to take me, liberate me from the life that had now become a burden, a strange ethereal white orb of light that didn't belong in this world started to form in the open air in front of me. Inside it, a figure was materialising.
I smiled as I spotted the long white hair.
"Alice."
When the glow faded enough for me to see her, she looked very much like she did on that one unforgettable, special day – she didn't look a day over twenty. She wore a pure white dress with long sleeves that clung to her arms until they reached her elbows where, from there, they flared out. The trim that folded over the neckline and shoulders left her shoulder blades exposed and she wore no veil. Instead, Alice was wearing a sleeveless cloak, white, and a silver coronet nestled into her white tresses. She looked like a seraph.
Alice's big brown vivacious eyes glistened as she smiled warmly down at me.
"Been waiting for you, I have, Tom Ward." Her voice sounded somewhat gentler and angelic, even though her Pendle accent was still there.
"I never doubted you were," I replied.
She leaned down slightly, stretching out her arm towards me.
"It's time," she said, offering her hand to me, waiting for me to take it.
I reached up and placed my hand in hers without a second thought.

Once she helped me to my feet, I glanced back over my shoulder to find myself, ninety, still sitting under the shade, green eyes that had faded over time staring straight at us. I turned back to face Alice, confused.
"Become younger, you have – just like me when I died – the second you chose to leave that life behind. You've become twenty-one again – same age you were when we were married. Remember that, Tom?" she explained.
I cupped her cheek and she leaned into my touch.
"How could I forget?" I began, leaning in to kiss her, "My wife."
We kissed quickly but passionately, the three words we both felt in the years of yet another enforced separation, what we would be feeling when we'd move on from this world, but didn't speak conveyed into that one kiss.

When our lips parted, I swept her off her feet and spun her round, our laughs echoing through the western garden as her hands grasped my shoulders.
As we laughed, before I'd set her safely back on her feet, I watched my older self, the body that would be left behind from out of the corner of my eye, close his eyes, a serene look on his face as his shaking hand lowered to the grass.
That last breath left his body.
It would soon be time for me and Alice to part ways once more, for us to move on. But who knows? Maybe someday we'd meet in another life…

Notes: okay, I know that this seems like a miserable first chapter, but only if you look at it like that. Mind you, it even got ME in tears and I'm the one writing it!