Underneath the Willow Tree

The tune of the rain pelting against the window entrances him, trapping him in a weary-eyed, half-mast stare. He's yearned for the rain like a wilting plant in the middle of a drought, and his heart nearly quivers with relief at the sound he's almost forgotten. Months, years if he's honest, have passed since he's heard water hit windowpanes and horribly patched roofs and he tries to wrap his head around the notion that there's something in this world worth far more than the free, calming sound of rain being cast away by a house and a home.

Bones watches the condensation expand across the window as his breath escapes to the glass mere inches from his mouth. It taunts him as it fogs the window, displaying the air he suddenly feels like he can't get back. His lungs burn and his eyes close as he rolls his forehead against the surface, bringing unsteady hands to swipe at the precipitation. His fingers leave streaks through the patch like tally marks for every failed effort he's made to bring oxygen back into his lungs so his fist meets it instead. The glass remains unblemished, but his knuckles do not. They protest, turning red as they slowly prepare to take on a shade of blue.

Cradling his hand to his chest, he slips from the window sill until he's sitting on a solid floor made up of nostalgically worn wood and a thin layer of dust. He presses his other hand to the flooring, pushing so that his back meets the faded, painted wall behind him. It accepts him like everything else in life, offering stability and a twinge of pain that will grow if he stays too long.

The wood underneath the palm of his hand vibrates in a rhythm that reaches his ears. Footsteps are soaking into a floor that should no longer have any so he takes his hand away, unwilling to pretend in his last solitary seconds that they belong to the person who owns this house.

As a shadow appears in the doorframe, he knows that while he may not have imagined her walking through the door, his heart was set on it. Therefore,when it's not her that emerges around the frame, his heart sinks like a drowned ice cube at the bottom of a liquor glass, confined and fading.

The man stops in the threshold as if he doesn't have authorization to enter the room, regardless of the way his footsteps possessed the floor mere seconds ago. Arms crossed, his strong shoulders narrow as he forces the wooden frame of the door to hold some of his weight as he leans against it and for a moment Bones believes he's angry enough to feel jealous that this place seems to accept Jim Kirk more than himself.

"Bones."

The word seems to reverberate around them as if the room cannot accept a name it does not know nor the man it belongs to. McCoy latches onto it instead, so it's not lost and covered with dust and a dollar amount like everything else.

"Yeah."

The word is whispered, foreign to his own ears as his gruff voice is replaced by something he cannot begin to claim, but the room accepts that word, soaking it in so it disappears quickly, owning it in a moment where everything else seems unknown.

Jim stares at him as if he too recognizes Leonard even when the man himself wouldn't lay claim to his own reflection and steps into the room in a way that seems he's been granted permission to enter by the highest council. Taking advantage as he always does, he fingers objects on the nightstand by the bed and going so far as to pick up a book and flip through its worn pages.

"We'll need to head out soon," Jim says, voice tight because of the dust in the room or for another reason Bones just won't identify. "Can't miss the shuttle."

"Yeah," he says again, closing his eyes as he listens to it settle into the curtains framing the window his mother only had up because his grandmother made them. He can almost hear her scold the ugly things as she beats the dust from them in Spring sunlight shinning through the windowpanes.

"Bones."

Jim's voice startles him from the memory and upon opening his eyes, he knows why. His friend is squatted down in front of him now, close enough so that anything they say will stay between them, leaving the room unaware.

"If...if there's nothing else you want to...take or uh, look at, we need to be going," he says and McCoy can't understand why he does, because he's never wanted anything from this house that he could carry in his hands and anything he ever wanted to look at is buried near a willow tree six feet underneath a fresh mound of dirt.

He shakes his head, whether it's because there's nothing else or he doesn't want to go, neither of them are quite sure. Jim takes command and although it lacks the brilliance and arrogance of his Captaincy, it flourishes with a compassion only a few people have been given the privilege to receive.

"I know," Kirk says with a nod of his head and his fingers wrap around the material of Bones' jacket as he makes purchase on his forearm. He tugs gently, forcing the doctor to his feet using guidance in place of strength in an uncharted world.

Jim pulls him to the door, but the older man uses brawn where Jim had not and stops in the threshold, fingers, bruised and quivering, grabbing onto the frame. He looks back at his mother's bedroom to see her standing near the window watching the rain hit the glass, but knows she's waiting for something, someone, that will never come.

He wants to call out to her, beg her to turn around and see that all that time she spent by the window wasn't wasted on a guy like Bones. However, Jim tugs on his arm, this time using strength because he won't allow his CMO to pretend he's anybody other than the man with a million regrets standing in the house he grew up in some odd years too late. He's not Leonard McCoy, and when someone buys the house and stands at the window waiting for someone else, he won't exist at all.

Bones was fine with Jim leading him in any direction that held the promise of a tall glass and a whiskey bottle, but as the taxi comes to a slow stop in front of the cemetery, McCoy refuses to follow. Despite his protests, however, Jim is already stepping from the car, tossing bills at the driver, and opening the doctor's door before a curse can even be laid out on Bones' tongue.

As he's pulled from the taxi into the chilly air left by the brief rain shower already pouring on the next town over, the only thing he can manage while stiffening his muscles is, "But the shuttle will-"

"Leave without us, and we will catch another one. It's alright. I've already got it straightened out," Jim says, and if McCoy could think straight he'd realize that Jim must have arranged all of this from the beginning.

He's pulled until they're at the edge of the shadow casted by the willow tree because no matter how much force Jim uses, no one could ever pull Bones to where he hasn't been since the day his father died.

"I'm going to be right over there, okay?" Jim says as if McCoy just stopped because he wouldn't allow him to walk under the willow tree. He points to a nearby bench that's just close enough that if he really listens he'll be able to hear if Bones changes his mind. "Take as much time as you need," and upon McCoy's mouth dropping open in protest, he adds, "at least three minutes, nothing less. If you want to leave after that, I won't stop you."

Jim nudges him just enough that his feet break the shadow when he stumbles forward and leaves him for the bench he promised he'd be at. Bones doesn't watch him go, but stares at the shade line casted across the tops of his shoes. There's mud scaling up the sides of his boots, but it feels an awful lot like quicksand, pulling him forward against his will.

It tugs at him until the leaves of the willow brush against his face as if he's the one weeping and as he comes to stand in front of two headstones, he realizes that he is.

His last name is etched in stone, marking the two lives that allowed his own to begin and he's back to being grateful that he's just Bones, because he can't fathom how the son that allowed parental labels on such pristine gravestones could ever live up to the name carved before him.

It's the word loving before mother and father that sends him to his knees. The stains soaking into his pants resemblant of the things he's done that he felt should have prohibited that word from his mother's marker.

The years twist his stomach, now laid out before him he knows just how many he let slip by because he could be nothing more than a coward and do little more than claim a last name. He wishes he could go back, if not to save his father like he should have done before, then to stay the next day and look his mother in the face when she cried for a life that should've been longer if only he'd had a better understanding of medicine.

However, he has enough pride left in him to straighten his shoulders defiantly and silently tell her that he brought a man back from the dead, he brought Jim back from the dead, and shouldn't that be enough? Shouldn't she be able to forgive him for not saving her husband, his father, because he's saved a man that she would have embraced the first day she met him and called him her son, mothered him as her own little boy despite already having one?

Still, he can't bear the effort it takes to hold his shoulders straight and they hunch as they should for a man who has the world upon him and feels like he doesn't even deserve that.

"I'm sorry," he says, and it sounds exactly like that foreign voice in his mother's bedroom, hollow and unsure, because what is he sorry for? He can't apologize for the things he's done to her, because to do so he would have to feel guilty that every bad choice he made in life led to gaining a friend and when the world threatened to take that away too, he cursed it to hell and said no. He may not have been able to save his father, but he saved Jim and he cannot, will not, apologize for that.

"He's my brother," and it's the most honest thought he's had or thing he's said since he received his mother's death notification two weeks ago, but he's incapable of coming up with another.

"She knows," and once again, Jim's voice startles him as the man squats down beside him and lays a hand on his back. McCoy does his best to keep his gaze forward, locked on his mother's name, because if he can't give her the apology she deserves because of Jim, he can at least give her the attention he's denied her for years. Painstakingly so, he finds he's incapable of that too when Jim pulls the small, paperback book from Mrs. McCoy's nightstand from the pocket of his jacket.

"She said...she'd leave it in here."

Bones glances up to meet Kirk's gaze, because Jim says it as if he's actually heard his mother's voice. The younger man swallows as if he's not quite sure he's ready to tell a deeply, guarded secret, but knows that he should. He pushes the book into McCoy's hands and urges him to, "Open it."

The doctor does so with the same motion Jim used in the bedroom and lets the worn pages rush out from under his thumb until a piece of cardstock catches in the spine. Picking it up, Jim takes the book back from him as his fingers unfold the thick paper to reveal his mother's perfectly cursive handwriting.

Leonard,

I'm so glad that you made it home and though I wasn't there to see you, I have the image forever etched in mind the day you walked through that door. I wish that I could have hugged you, or even heard your voice, but I know that as long as my wishes remained unfulfilled, your wishes did not, and that's more than a mother could dare to ask for any of her children. I'm so proud of the doctor you've became, but even more so of the man you are. I love you more than anything, darling. Take care of Jim, as I know and love him for taking care of you.

Love,

Mom

As much as he wants to stay in this moment of newly found forgiveness and love, he can't help but look over at Jim, can't go on without understanding how it's possible for his mother to know of a child she never had.

"H-how?"

"She was just that perfect of a mother," Jim says, and it's as if he has years of memories of being tucked into bed by her warm, slender hands and kissed on the forehead while a song hummed between them. It hurts Bones to know that he doesn't even have the slightest clue of how true his statement is, but then Kirk takes the note back from him, folds it into the book, and places it back in his pocket for safe keeping all with a smile on his face, saying, "She was right about you, ya know. Look exactly like your old man, but you're just like her," and somehow McCoy knows that a part of his mother's life went into his best friend.

McCoy blinks at him, still unable to ask how the mother he abandoned knew of the brother he gained, but when Jim pulls him up from the ground and leads him away from his parents' graves with a, "It's gonna be alright, Bones," he knows that it's the truth, knows that there underneath the willow tree is where his family started and where it will never end.