My Apple Tree

It's late and the house is sleeping. Kennedy's fingers are curled around Willow's hair in a way she would normally find endearing but tonight it's just hard.

Hard because Xander's back and he'd been gone so long, most of the summer and all of the winter spent far away in mourning. She hadn't known, couldn't understand, that his absence would help craft the hole in her heart even bigger. She didn't realize the hole was still there, dormant and waiting, not until tonight when he'd come through the door.

He was a good faker, he'd always been. He smiled appropriately and laughed in all the right places and he had presents for Dawn and Buffy and he clasped the sweetest necklace Willow had ever seen around her neck with a kiss to her forehead. A kiss that lingered and burnt like cinnamon oil and she knew. Willow knew he was hollowed out and spent and that nearly a year working in the rainfall of Seattle hadn't done a single thing to fill him up. Distance doesn't always mend.

And Kennedy's fingers looped around her hair pulled and pained her as she thought about the figure a story below wrapped in flannel. She hurt because he is her apple tree, her brightness, and years and distance stitched couldn't ever still that.

***

It's colder than she thought it would be and the air holds just the faintest stench of beer but he's awake. Just like she knew he would be. The television is flickering harshly in tones of black, white and gray and he doesn't flinch when she settles in next to him on the couch. No, he only lifts the flannel blanket and invites her in and it's just enough. Just enough that she can't stop the hiccupping cry that floods the room as she rests in the strength of his arms.

"Oh Will," he barely whispers, "When did everything just get so wrong?"

"You want the Reader's Digest Condensed version?" She asks nuzzling against him and how right it is she thinks somewhere far away.

"Nah," he tells her his arms wrapping around her just a little more, "I've got the unabridged version at home and yeah, can't beat the original. Broke a couple of good baseball bats trying."

She looks up at him, he tries she thinks, fingers uncurling against his chest and over his heart. Over her heart. He doesn't have to, she wants to tell him, there's no one around who'd admonish him this moment, his moment; their moment. But there aren't words and there are never words.

So she says nothing and it's good, it's right that she shouldn't. She thinks about him, here in the darkness against the rise and fall of his chest, that there still is an essence to him that reminds her of the boy on the playground. Her boy. That's what she wants to tell him, hands on either side of his face. But she can't speak for the tears and the grief that never quite goes away.

He knows she realizes, his fingers reaching up to cap her tears, the slope of his lips; the emptiness of his eyes, he knows. And she hates that emptiness, the way it distills itself in her. Because he deserves better, she thinks before leaning in kiss to his mouth, forbidden and wrong and so far away from right but she has to see. She has to know if his kisses will burn.

They do burn but she doesn't pull away and neither does he. His fingers, calloused and strong move against the back of her hair, tangling where Kennedy's had not that long ago. And it's so wrong and so right that her hands leaves the plane of his face across his tee shirt and down below to the rough denim of the jeans he hadn't shucked for sleep.

She feels him underneath the coarse material and she remembers the last of their great sleepovers, before Buffy and the Hellmouth. Fourteen and green, the wide eyed feel of his hardness against her in his sleep.

"Will." He gasps out against her touch and she stops but he says nothing else as her fingers nimbly work the button and the zipper until he's in her hand. Warm and alive and just there. Then his mouth is against her neck and this. This is right. It has to be because he's hers and always will be and this hole that she didn't know was still there? It's mending, she can feel it. And his kisses, they don't burn nearly so much anymore.

She just loves him so much and she can't think of any way to make him better, to make the mourning ebb, but to bring him back but through her hands and mouth and...

***

The sun is just starting to peek through the curtains and birds are outside chirping in the morning. His arms are still around her, flesh against flesh and he's smiling in his sleep. Willow wonders if she is too, her fingers touch her lips in odd estrangement. She smells him against her hands, on her and all over her.

Are you better, she wants to ask him pulling away from him gently, ever so gently. He has to be, Willow believes searching for her gown, her panties in the not quite day or night dark of the room.

He's her apple tree, her brightness and she's healing and so is he and everything. Everything will be better.

It'll be better, she thinks, stealing up the stairs into her room, where Kennedy is stretched out beneath the sheets waiting for her.



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