Chapter 32

They'd talked, briefly, about meeting in San Francisco, but, as it turned out, neither he nor McCoy was particularly enamored of that idea, and so Kirk finds himself, one day in mid-September, stepping off the airtram in Athens into sultry Georgian heat, with a yellow sun piercing the gray-white clouds above and a sense of weightlessness buoying up his weary bones. The seasons are just beginning to skirt the edge of fall, but the summer hasn't yet left the air, and, as he steps through the terminus doors and onto the street outside, the sluggish breeze is heavy with the scent of sun-baked asphalt, of fall-blooming flowers and warm grass, of humid skies that threaten rain.

Kirk stands for a moment, disregarded, as passengers billow around him, greeting friends and family, pulling out their communicators, moving out into the late afternoon traffic and talking easily in a hum of human sound that settles into his skin: noise and motion, life filtering past. He watches them dissolve into the city tides and eddies, and sucks in a breath, centering himself. He needed this.

Bones' erstwhile family home is some forty kilometers south of the city center, brushing the outskirts of the small settlement where his father used to practice medicine in days long gone. Kirk has visited only once before, many years ago, and he's surprised to find, as the taxi glides along the narrow, cypress-lined road, that he remembers the impressions, if not the place. He was a Lieutenant Commander then, not long in possession of his stripes, and filled with the self-assurance of youth and talent. It feels like another lifetime, and yet, as he pulls up outside the tall, wrought-iron gates that furnish a struggling hole in a sprawling hedgerow, he has the strongest sensation that, if he were to turn over his shoulder, he might catch a glimpse of that shadow self, skittering out of sight. There's a certain sense of comfort in that. The past is a river, forever flowing out of reach, but some things don't change.

The house itself is set onto a low incline: a blue-gabled farmhouse that nestles into a comfortable curtain of sweetgum and hickory, and peers reclusively above the high brush that separates it from the road below. Paint is peeling from the shutters, and the decking on the wraparound porch has warped in the last winter chill, but the yard is neatly trimmed and swept, the windows are clean and glinting in the afternoon sunlight, the flowerbeds recently tended. Kirk grins. Bones was always good at this: segueing between lives as though he's shrugging on a different suit.

The door opens as he approaches the stoop, and the doctor appears, leaning his shoulder against the frame and folding his arms across his chest, with that customary ineffable smile of his breaking through his beard.

"Hot enough for you?" he drawls in manifest amusement, and Kirk returns the grin with a wry twist of his lips as he considers the patina of sweat that has settled itself across every exposed inch of his flesh.

He shrugs. "I've seen hotter."

"Don't believe I ever saw you turn just that shade of scarlet before, Admiral," says Bones, levering himself upright from his perch. "You best come inside before you pass out. Lord knows, I don't wanna have to go rustlin' about for a hypo - I'm off duty."

Kirk feels his grin widen, deepen, spread across his face as he climbs the steps to the porch and his friend steps back to clear the door, gesturing with one hand towards the cool, shadowy hallway beyond. Yes. He needed this.

"No Lori?" says Bones, too casually, as Kirk crosses the threshold and moves into the blissful chill of climate control. He feels himself bristle at the careless appropriation of his private life, but, he considers, it's not as though he wasn't expecting the question. He is, in fact, mildly disconcerted that these weren't the first words out of the doctor's mouth.

"She had to work," he says, and focuses his attention on toeing off his boots. The wooden floorboards are polished to a high sheen, and Bones is barefoot.

"Work, huh?" says McCoy conversationally. "And you didn't?"

Despite his brain's best intentions, Kirk's eyes shoot his friend a warning look. "Clearly," he says.

But the doctor's face is open, disingenuous. "Thought you told me you two were working on the same project?"

"We work on a lot of projects, Bones."

"Huh." The blue eyes bore a hole into Kirk's, and he can see the workings of an active mind behind the relentless gaze. Bones misses very little. "I guess you do," he says at last.

A beat, and then he blinks the moment away. "Shame, though," he says amiably. "Might've been nice to offer my congratulations to the woman who made an honest man outta James Kirk. Well, Admiral, sir," he adds, as Kirk opens his mouth to make some sort of noise in defense of his honor, "what can we get you to drink?"

Bones misses nothing. Kirk feels like he ought to remember this by now. But there's nothing else for it but to let it happen, to flow with the tides of his mercurial disposition and deal with the inevitable fall-out when it comes. For now, they're doing amiable southern gentlemen at their ease. And he does want a drink.

So he makes himself grin away the lingering irritation, and says, with an amicable tone that's not entirely forced, "Whatever you're having, Dr. McCoy."

"Only one thing to drink, heat like this," says Bones with an ominous smirk. "Picked the mint leaves myself, fresh this morning."

"Ah." Kirk lets his chin drop to his collarbone in good-natured resignation as Bones sets off down the hallway towards the kitchen. "I believe you've been threatening this for several years now, Doctor."

"Wouldn't call it so much a threat as a promise, Admiral." The voice trails behind him as he passes through a doorway that's bathed in rich September sunlight. "Got some of that Aldebaran firewater left somewhere - it ain't bourbon, mind, but it packs a hell of a punch."

If Kirk has learned anything from their years of friendship, it's when to pick his battles. "Wonderful," he calls, and hears a low rumble of laughter from his friend.

"One good, old-fashioned Georgia-style mint julep, coming up," says Bones. "Go on through to the lounge, Jim. You remember where it is, right?"

The interior of the house has been left, virtually unchanged, as it was built some three hundred years earlier: the parlor sits alone and untouched at the front of the house, but, behind it, the second reception room has been knocked through into what was once a formal dining room, to create a long, open-plan living space that spreads along the length of the eastern wall. Summer spills like melted gold through the far French doors that open onto the back porch and, through the doorway that connects the lounge to the kitchen, Kirk can hear the promising sounds of clinking glass and splashing liquid.

"You ever take that trip you were planning back in May?" calls Bones, over the rattle of muddling ice and mint leaves losing their battle with structural integrity. "Out Yosemite way, wasn't it?"

Kirk drops his overnight bag into an armchair, walks quietly across the room to one of the high windows that looks out onto the sloping, tree-dappled lawn to the side of the house, where bright patches of sunlight testify to the afternoon's valiant battle against the encroaching rain.

"Postponed," he says, though he knows better than to think that this is something he's likely to get away with. "Something came up."

Bones chuckles, as he steps through into the room, condensation-frosted glass in either hand. "Figured it might," he says cheerfully, crossing to stand beside his friend. He passes a beaker to Kirk, raises his own. "To old times," he says.

The angry ache is silent now, like an old scar that covers a place where a wound used to be. So there's no strain, no tension, to his voice as Kirk raises his glass in return, clinks it against Bones', and answers, "Old times." And if the smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, it doesn't fall far short.

Bones doesn't miss it, though. Bones misses nothing.

He takes a sip from his drink, gaze fixed, unwaveringly, on his companion. "You ever hear from any of the old crew?" he asks pleasantly.

Nothing. Kirk's smile, fraying around the edges, relaxes into something a little warmer, because there is, after all, something comforting in being known so well. "Not really," he says. "Chekov commed a while back."

"Chekov? Thought he was on the Orleans?"

"He was. He's been seconded to Luna for twelve months. I think he thought I could get him out of it."

"Poor kid," says Bones, and he turns at last to face the windowed yard, where a light wind is rustling the tops of the sweetgums. "Not much out that way for him, I guess."

"They have a decent weapons certification program at the base in Armstrong," says Kirk, raising his glass to sniff speculatively at the contents. "He'll need to improve his rating before he's eligible for promotion." A tentative sip, and he grimaces, to the doctor's manifest delight. "Bones, is there any whisky in this, or did you just heap sugar into water and mix it around?"

"Grows on you," says his friend with a jubilant smile. "Guess he thought he'd earn his credits shipboard, huh? Well, won't do him any harm, I guess. Last I heard, Sulu was trying to swing a posting out that way. Those two were always pretty tight."

"They made a damn good navigation team," says Kirk, as neutrally as he can. "Well. I guess they'll serve together again when the Enterprise leaves drydock. I've recommended them both for the bridge."

"That so?"

Kirk nods, purses his lips, takes another sip from his glass. Bones is right: it does grow on you. "Uhura too," he says.

"Huh." In his peripheral vision, Kirk sees Bones twist his gaze sideways, fix Kirk with one of his stares. He doesn't return it. "Guess the whole gang's back together then."

"No sense in breaking up a good command crew," says Kirk lightly, but he knows what's in his eyes and he's not about to share it. So, instead, he keeps his head straight and his spine tight and he stares out into the garden, focusing his gaze on the swaying branches outside as the first spots of rain begin to fall.

-o-o-o-

It's better, now, than it was. Bones stormed out of Starfleet in an apocalyptic rage that Kirk - newly promoted, cut loose from all moorings and adrift in uncharted space - was just not equipped to deal with, and there was something of a release, if he's brutally honest, in having a steady target for all that simmering, incandescent anger that couldn't be properly directed up the chain of command. He remembers feeling the last tethers of self-control slip through his fingers; he remembers striking his new desk with enough force to shatter a hairline fracture into his fifth metacarpal; he remembers that one of them called the other a coward and a fool, but he can't remember which of them it was, and he's never going to ask, not now. It's not as though either answer will make him feel any better.

And he remembers, even then, knowing that it wasn't Bones that he was angry with. He remembers reading and re-reading the message, freshly arrived in his inbox not half an hour before the doctor stormed into his office with tales of insubordination and bullheaded admirals and the willful ineptitude of Starfleet Command, until the letters blurred together and the words stopped making sense, because Sarek, Kirk could understand, but his wife's intransigence was completely unexpected, and it gouged the heart out of the only hope he had left.

My son is unwell, Admiral, Amanda had written. Please allow us our privacy.

It made no sense, and he didn't know what else to do, and then Bones barged in and announced, in tones of scalded injustice, that he'd tried his damndest to argue away the only thing that remained to anchor Kirk to himself, and expected his wholehearted agreement.

They didn't speak for a lot of months after that. Kirk had to comm Joanna, in the end, just to find out where her father had gone. But it got better, slowly, one message at a time, the way things do between old friends who've fallen into bitterness and recrimination, when both of them want to put it right.

By nightfall, the storm has blown itself out, and Bones has opened the French doors to let in the damp night air, thick with the scent of rainwater and wet grass and late evening blossom. They've moved from syrupy Georgian cocktails onto the more specialist items from the doctor's well-stocked liquor cabinet and, if everything wasn't so utterly changed, Kirk could almost believe they were back on the Enterprise, ship settled in for the night and purring beneath his feet, as the Captain and his CMO take their leisure on a quiet evening when there's nothing more demanding to claim their time.

His friend is winding down his sad catalog of the misfortunes that befell him at his daughter's recent birthday celebrations - the reason he's made the cross-sector trip back to Earth - and Kirk can feel his eyes getting heavy as he sips from his third glass of something purplish-brown and surprisingly drinkable, with a flavor like peppered lilac. There's no real grievance behind Bones' story; if anything, it's undercut by a heady current of relief that these things are possible now, that his relationship with his only child has thawed sufficiently that an invitation to her home is now something that can happen, regardless of whether or not that comes tied to three hours in the company of her mother and her mother's extensive family, all of whom blame Bones, unequivocally, for the breakdown of his marriage.

"Who knows?" he says, philosophically, cradling his glass against his chest. The light has left the day now, and neither of them have made any move towards turning on the lamps. There's something soothing about sitting easily in the creeping dark, surrounded by the sounds and scents of the deep countryside. "Maybe she has a point. Can't see as it matters now, anyway."

"She sounds happy," says Kirk quietly, and he can hear the torpor settling into his words even as they leave his mouth. "Joanna. She sounds like she's found…" and he pauses, considering. "…Her place," he says at last. "Where she's supposed to be."

"Yup," says Bones. "I guess so. And that ain't nothing."

"No. It's not." Outside, the thin layer of clouds is shifting, chased by the wind to the corners of the sky. The stars are coming out. "She sounds happy," he says again, and he closes his eyes.

"You okay, Jim?" says Bones quietly, slicing through the blanket of hush, and Kirk realises he's on the verge of falling asleep in his chair. Maybe purplish-brown drinks that taste of peppered lilac are a bridge too far at this time of night.

"I believe," he says, and the end of the word telescopes into a wide yawn, "that it's time for me to turn in."

"Yeah," says Bones, and the shadows shift as his face splits into a grin. "Guess we're neither of us as young as we used to be, Admiral."

"Please stop calling me 'Admiral', Bones."

"Thought you'd be used to it by now."

"You remember when you were promoted to Commander?"

"That's different."

"And the Surgeon General sent your next certification reminder to Commander Leonard McCoy?"

"He oughtta've known better."

"It is your rank, Commander."

"Was, Jim." The voice is light, but there's a question behind it that Kirk doesn't quite know how to read. And the darkness falls too evenly on Bones' face to take his answer there. "No ranks in civilian practice."

"Ah." Here and now, with the conversation flowing as it used to and the doctor's liquor warming his veins, it's too easy to forget how much has changed. "My apologies - Doctor McCoy."

A philosophical shrug from the shadows. "I forget myself, half the time." A beat. "Funny, I guess."

"How so?" says Kirk, though he thinks he knows where the conversation is going.

"The way things turn out. You ever think…?"

"No." It's out before he knows he's going to interrupt, but there is no way that sentence can end that's going to take them down a path Kirk wants to travel. "I try not to, Doctor."

"Yeah." A sigh. "You and me both, Jim."

"It is what it is," says Kirk. He tilts his glass towards him, moonlight shifting on the mobile surface of the liquid. "Things change. We both could have done a lot worse, you and I."

A gentle laugh. "Speak for yourself, Mr. Chief of Starfleet Operations."

"You'll have to try harder than that," says Kirk, "to convince me you're not perfectly content to be stationed seven light years away from the nearest transporter array."

"You read the studies I've read," says Bones darkly, "and then you tell me those things are safe."

Kirk grins. "Five years in deep space, in the company of Klingons and Romulans and Tholians, on top of a warp coil powered by the violent collision of matter and antimatter, Dr. McCoy, and it's safety of the transporters that keeps you awake at night."

"Sure," says Bones. "Maybe you don't mind scattering your atoms all over the ether, but I'm a doctor, not an energy wave. I'll pass, thanks."

"You're a man out of your time, Bones," says Kirk fondly. "You always were."

Across the room, a breath of laughter agitates the darkness. "I guess so, Jim," says his friend, and he stretches in his chair, shadows and moonlight shifting on his legs as they straighten, lengthen along the floor. "Give me a shuttle dock and one-quarter impulse any day of the week. I like a planet that knows how to do things the old-fashioned way."

Kirk is quiet for a moment, considering, as he lifts his glass to his lips and lets perfume-spiced liquor flow over his tongue, needling the back of his throat as he swallows, spreading a curtain of warmth across his chest. Ice chimes against crystal as his hand drops back again to rest against the arm of the chair, soft against the blanket of hush.

"It sounds to me," he says quietly, "like you might have found your place, too, Bones."

The words settle into the thick night air that ambles through the open doors and curls the scent of moisture and leaf mold through the gloom. From the quiet yard outside, Kirk can hear the first spots of returning rain striking the curling paintwork of the porch, the timbre of the darkness shifting as the clouds begin to break.

"Maybe," says Bones thoughtfully. "Maybe not. Not so sure I ever had a place, Jim." A beat. "Not like you."

Kirk purses his lips, tightens his grip on his glass. "My place," he says, "is where I can be of most use to Starfleet. That's the way it goes."

"You know damn well where your place is, Jim," says Bones, but there's no fire in the words, only a kind of worn-out resignation. "Lord knows, I wish some other people knew it too."

"Other people?"

"You know who I mean."

Yes. Kirk is pretty sure he does. But he's too tired to argue; too tired to work out what it is his friend wants to hear. So, instead, he says, wearily, "Let it alone, Bones."

"Some things," says the doctor, "just fall out wrong. That's all I'm saying."

"I've done all right. Better than all right, Bones. I have a challenging job, a job I enjoy. I have a chance to do good work where I am. I'm perfectly content."

"Yeah?" Even in the darkness, Kirk can feel his friend's close, evaluative stare. But he doesn't have to return it. "That ain't the same as being happy, Jim."

Kirk huffs a tight laugh. "What is this obsession," he says, "that everyone seems to have with my happiness?"

"Damn it, Jim," says Bones. "Sometimes, I swear, it's like you don't even want to see what's right in front of your face. It all fell out wrong, you know it did. And just 'cause it can't be fixed, doesn't mean you gotta be okay with that."

"My life doesn't need to be fixed, Bones. It's fine. Maybe you're through with Starfleet, but I'm not. I happen to like my job."

"I'm not talking," says Bones, "about the damn job."

It is, almost word for word, what Lori said to him two nights ago, opening salvo in a battle of words that led well into the small hours and ended in three more shots of whisky than he ought to have had, and a restless night of residual fury spent, sleepless, in the guest room. He just doesn't have the energy to have the same fight all over again.

"Bones," he says. "Let it alone. There's nothing more to say. It's over."

"Ah, Jim," says his friend quietly, and the words are soft and full of regret, breathed out on the end of a sigh. "Don't look much like it's over to me."

The angry ache, so long forgotten, twists without warning, burning brightly against his ribs and tightening his belly. Bones has a talent for feeding it, thinks Kirk, and turns it into motion before it can close off his chest.

"I'm going to bed," he says, and gets to his feet.

Bones stands with him, draining his glass in one easy movement. "Why don't you take some time, Jim?" he says. "Take a trip, come back out to Beta Auraculi with me for a few weeks. Lord knows, I could do with the company out there on that empty rock. What do you say - how long's it been since you took a real vacation?"

"Bones," says Kirk gently, as evenly as he can. "You know how it is."

"Yeah," says his friend, and he shakes his head. His eyes glint in the moonlight; he looks tired, dispirited, every year of his age. "I guess I do."

There's a long moment of heavy silence, full of all the things they haven't said, and then the doctor sucks in a sharp breath, fracturing the stillness, and pads across the room to where the French doors lie open in front of the gathering downpour. But he reaches out as he passes Kirk, presses one hand to his friend's upper arm, tightens his fingers in a brief grip and lets them fall away.

"Goodnight, Bones," says Kirk, and his friend, silhouetted against a pale halo of moonlight, nods once.

"Night, Jim," he answers, but he doesn't look round as Kirk drains the last remnants of peppered lilac from his glass, sets it quietly on the coffee table, moves across the dark room towards the hallway. And it's only as Kirk steps through the door, out into the cool, inky blackness beyond, that he thinks he hears his friend say, softly - almost too softly to hear, "I sure hope that green-blooded son-of-a-bitch is happy. That's all."