Written for this prompt:

Sam died in childhood - his stepdad beat him to death, and was never found out (disposed of the body somehow? And said that he just ran away - he had a history of it, afterall). He just didn't know that Jim saw the whole thing, but too scared, he never said or did anything about it.

I took the title from the old fairy tale "The Juniper Tree." You can find the Grimms' version here:

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Jim tries not to remember his older brother Sam, who everyone believes ran away from home as a teenager. When the annual Kelvin anniversary articles appear describing his family they usually mention random facts about George and Winona Kirk's oldest son: "Missing and presumed dead;" "Often in trouble at school;" and "Reported to have a beautiful singing voice as a child." None of them touch who Sam really was.

Jim Kirk doesn't speak to his mother much since he hit the age of majority. Once in while he has a message from her that basically says "How are you?" and "I'm doing fine with husband 4." There isn't much for them to say to one another and there never was. Not even the important things like "My stepfather beat me with a belt until I passed out" or "The man you married on leave and then left your kids with even though you hardly knew him is a psycho and hates us."

Thirteen years after the fact, Jim wonders how he can say, "Frank hit Sam so hard he cracked Sam's skull against the wall, and Sam never woke up again." At least that's what he figures happened. By the time he heard the sounds of fighting and snuck into the house, Sam was already laying on the floor in his own blood and Frank was in front of the viewer watching wrestling.

Jim just remembered holding his brother's bloody face in his lap, and rocking back and forth, praying for him to wake up. Waiting for Frank to drink himself stupid and pass out so he could sneak to the com and message for emergency services.

Except by the time Frank passed out, Sam had already stopped breathing, and Frank woke up long enough to beat Jim senseless when he saw him at the communicator. When he woke up, Sam's body was gone and Frank told him if he ever spoke of it, to his mom or anyone, Jim would be next. Looking at the blood on the floor and bed, Jim believed him.

All these years later, how does he say, "Your oldest son didn't run away from home that last time. He died and Frank dumped him in the woods behind the house." It took Jim nearly a year to find what was left of him, which may have been a blessing in truth. It was horrible enough to come across the scattered bones and cracked skull, and he had retched in the bushes he had run towards for the better part of an hour.

Jim went back to the house and grabbed a white pillowcase and gloves. The next day he forced himself to fill it with the bones he found, mainly by feel because he couldn't stand to look at the them. The skull was the hardest to touch even through the gloves. He just kept murmuring "I'm sorry Sam…" over and over in his head.

He took the remains to a large tree in the backyard, the one he and Sam had climbed on and built a makeshift fort in as children. He buried the bag of bones there, and sat listening to the birds sing in the tree above.

A week later, he had taken anything of value he could find from the house and run away. When he was finally picked up by authorities, his mother decided that two runaways proved Frank couldn't handle the boys and she sent Jim to stay with her sister on Tarsus IV. There he saw what bodies were like before they turned to bones, and was thankful it took so long to find Sam.

After he was rescued, he went back to Iowa, but Frank and his mother had divorced and the figure from his nightmares was gone. He wandered, and worked odd jobs and stayed with friends as much as possible. His mother sold the farm from space, and he still stayed away.

He learned to fight men bigger and stronger than Frank had ever been, the hard way, by picking fights and surviving them as best he could. He learned to fight dirty, and it served him well after joining Starfleet. He could take anyone and some part of his mind always planned to be ready if he ever came across Frank again, ready to punch his face into the wall as many times as it took to kill him.

But when it finally happens, it doesn't go as planned. Jim is Captain of The Enterprise by then and he knows if he takes his revenge he will lose it all. He can't do that, even for revenge. Even for Sam.

When he comes across the bastard drinking himself stupid in a bar on Orion II, Jim taunts him into a fight. He has security take Frank up to The Enterprise and throw him in the brig as a criminal. Then he opens a video communication and as clearly and rationally as possible describes what the crime was and where what's left of his brother's body can be found.

When the DNA of the bones is confirmed, Jim drops him off at the nearest Federation outpost to await transport to Earth, and attempts to survive the call from his mother, who is sobbing hysterically and begging "Why didn't you tell me?"

Jim could give her a thousand answers, starting with "I was twelve years old and though he would kill me too!" Instead he simply says, "You wouldn't protect us. You left us with no way to get help. He controlled everything."

The next time Jim returns to Earth it is to testify at Frank's trial. Afterwards, he goes to the cemetery where Sam rests beside their father, and leaves flowers and cries. There is no tree over the grave, but there are still birds singing.

Jim imagines what Sam would sing about everything that happened, if he could. He hopes his brother is singing somewhere, then he returns to the ship where there are no birds and only the sound of the stars.

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