It's not that Jim doesn't believe in soulbonds, doesn't believe in their existence, their power to alter and shape lives, their power to build and destroy and sway the galaxy.
It's not that he doesn't believe in the fairy tales told to every child from their earliest moments. It's more that he never heard them in the first place. He lived them instead.
JTK
George and Winona Kirk were soul-mates. A more obvious truth has probably never been spoken. They met their first day at the academy, accidentally brushing their hands together while borrowing a pencil for just long enough for a spark to prompt a coffee date, and a kiss a week later that leads to a careful neck clasp that confirms what they've already known all along.
They get married a year later, after a picture perfect and textbook respectable engagement, in the apple orchard behind her parents' house.
It's perfect, down to the last detail. It's apple pie and beautiful and classic, even up till George's final sacrifice for the storybook family they are forming.
Except, all the apple pie in the universe can't fix a fractured soul, and Winona leaves a piece of herself in neutral space, hanging somewhere for all time between Vulcan and Romulus.
Unfortunately, like the storybook says, it's also the best part.
JTK
Jim has felt the pull for as long as he can remember, his face drawn inexorably towards the stars, a little to the left of Orion's belt, somewhere past the left hand star. It's oddly specific, and somehow even at four, Georgie's sad eyes and downcast expression when their grandparents kiss at dinner is enough to prevent him from ever telling anyone about it.
Winona marries Frank a year later, and Jim loses any bitterness about waiting for your soul-mate because the alternative is so much worse.
Georgie follows his own pull at the age of fifteen, and Jim blames him right up until he returns from hell an emaciated wreck with only Frank for company and finds a postcard discarded on the hall floor, a thick layer of dust just obscuring the edges of his brother's golden hair peeking out of a white bundle held carefully between two laughing people framed against a sunset.
It's a storybook all over again, but Jim loves his brother enough to wish this one will have a different ending than the one they grew from the ashes of.
He keeps the postcard.
JTK
Meeting Bones is a startling experience, and Jim waits less than half the shuttle ride to not quite casually brush his wrist across the base of the other man's stubbled neck.
The bitter disappointment is surprisingly more than assuaged by the friendship that develops out of the gesture, and Jim learns how to not be able to live without Bones fast enough to doubt the whole soul-mate thing, for surprisingly the first time in his life.
Except, there's a burnt patch just under Bones' shirt collar that is rare enough that Jim lasts a whole three months before he finds enough liquid courage to just come out and ask.
After deciding Bones' ex-wife is more of a bitch than he'd previously thought possible, because who redacts their own other half for a lawyer of all things, Jim ends up spending the next week learning more than he ever wanted to know about Bond Theory. Which is apparently a rather hot field these days.
Still, learning that soul-bonds can change, rewrite, reset, even expand, is a surprisingly bittersweet realization because Frank was an arsehole but it probably would have made his mother happy and if only he didn't look so damn much like George fucking Kirk.
Three years on Bones' neck is still as burnt as Jim's is bare, and somehow he's okay with that.
And a little disappointed, but who wouldn't be. It's Leonard H. McCoy for Christsakes!
JTK
Zefram Cochrane didn't have a soul-mate. That was the working theory among the surprisingly gossipy human survivors of the devastation that follows world war III, right up until the minute the sky lights up and a bunch of surprisingly tall men from not-Mars with pointy years delicately raise their eyebrows in time to a rather raunchy rock and roll blast. Then Stonn of Vulcan brushes his fingers convulsively over the base of the scruffy explorer's neck.
The rest is history, although two centuries later both sides are still wondering exactly what force in the universe led to first contact. Chance is not usually the prime suspect.
JTK
It's understandable then, given the rare but significant historical precedent, that Sarek of Vulcan is not exactly the first "alien" to find a human soul-mate. Meeting Amanda is a logical progression of his swift rise through the diplomatic ranks and request for posting to earth. He'd visited once with his father and part of him had always known.
Soul-bonds are logical for Vulcans because Surak decided they were, and as illogical as that reasoning is, it works for them just as much as it works for the rest of the galaxy.
Sarek will freely admit, and does every time he bestows his beloved with her name in all its meaning, that Amanda is the love of his life. She's also his soul-mate, and thus his marriage to her was the height of logic.
Explaining soul-bonds to his eight year old seems overly complicated though, something which Sarek will later regret, but somehow not.
Because Spock grows up believing that love is illogical, which isn't wrong.
It's the fact that is isn't wrong that takes longer for Sarek to impart.
Because Amanda is the love of his life, his soul-mate, as he is hers, but somehow, there is always something missing, some part of him that longs for wide open spaces and blue skies, something that pulls in equal alternating patterns to different points from west and north and the sky. Something that calls to him, the further he travels, even with Amanda pressed closely to his heart. Or perhaps that is when the call is the keenest.
And it isn't until he stands broken and fractured on a transporter pad starring at his son grasping for nothingness, his soul equal measure dying and coming alive, that he pauses to reflect that he never asked his beloved if she felt it too, that pull.
That will always remain his single greatest regret.
JTK
Jim doesn't get it, not until he's having the life choked out of him on his own sort of bridge. Maybe he was in denial, maybe he just didn't know what to look for, but until that moment it somehow hasn't quite clicked yet.
Part of it is shock, Bones' will tell him later, the mental shock of losing a part of himself before he ever really gains it, the telepathic feedback of a dying race echoing over a bond that is half dead itself. The fact that Spock's father is probably the most awe-inspiring Batman-esque guy Jim will ever meet notwithstanding, even he has his limits.
Apparently, those limits include Jim. He's far from surprised. Most people's do.
None of it is helped by the meld of course, emotional compromisation causing enough cascade feedback to leave Jim with a burning certainty that somewhere, somewhen, this man was his soulmate, close enough to touch, to hold. And enough of Jim still wants to do just that, even on the bridge of his supposed ship with a younger, darker version of that same man choking the life out of him that this whole thing is getting a tad too Freudian for Jim's taste.
Except, except, there's that voice. "Spock." It's not a shout, not even slightly raised, distinctly a command and distinctly not aimed for Jim's ears.
But somehow, just like the fairy tales don't say, even without a brush against his neck, that's the moment Jim knows. Or maybe that's a Vulcan thing, and the parental bond resonating across the bridge between two sets of black eyes is enough to tell.
Sarek spares Jim the barest of glances before he follows his son in a sweep of rather awesome robes, and damn if that isn't the moment that Jim falls for the guy because as much as he's never tried to deny the existence of soul-mates Jim has always hated the poet who wrote that they were the strongest kind of love in the universe. Almost as much as he'd hated his parents for proving that poet right.
It's the first part of Jim's cracked soul that Sarek pieces back together.
Three days later, standing in a freshly empty hanger on the edges of the academy, he suspects it will also be the last, if the Vulcan himself has anything to say about it.
JTK
How Spock found out about the whole thing, Jim never finds out. It's not as if Sarek was likely to be posting any advertisements, and although the two of them seem to speak more these days than Jim does with Bones-which is saying a lot-he somehow doubts they've gotten that deep yet. They are still Vulcans after all.
Still, Scotty accidentally brushes his hand against Uhura when she's handing him a towel four months into their first tour, because honestly for an engineer on a Starship, he spends a surprising amount of time taking unexpected dips in tanks of water, and Jim thinks he sees a small part of Spock's heart break, even as logic descends like a steel door over surprisingly expressive near black eyes and Jim wraps himself in enough borrowed memories to make his offer of chess and chocolate more comforting than it is awkward.
Spock surprises them both by accepting, and the friendship that develops might not exactly be entirely epic, but it reminds him enough of Bones to come pretty close, something which makes a heck of a lot more sense eighteen months down the line when Spock is bleeding out on a planet that still uses projectile weapons and their supplies dwindled to less than one shirt between them three days ago so Bones is definitely past caring that he isn't wearing standard issue physician neutral gloves when he presses his hands to Spock's carotid and who saw that one coming anyway.
Nobody's ever actually explained the existence of tri-bonds. They're rare enough that the scientific community has never been particularly interested, what little research the galaxy had burning with Vulcan, but Jim catches the elder Spock watching his younger counterpart with Bones sometimes, and the man's expressive and ancient eyes flick to Jim just often enough to make the connection.
Jim will always wonder what changed, between that universe and theirs, but some things just don't seem to have an explanation, his own blue eyed reflection just foreign enough after Nero to provide constant proof that there are stranger things in heaven and earth than shifting soul-bonds.
It does little to ease the ache in his chest though, and some days the knowledge that it will never go away is the only thing that keeps Jim anchored, to Sarek, or the universe, or himself, he's never quite sure which.
Spock takes Jim home two shore leaves off from the end of their first five year mission. And it is still home, for all that there are three suns above their heads instead of two and Bones is in Georgia with Joanna for this leave.
Jim's never asked Spock if he approves, the subject has never come up, and it's been four years since Amanda's death and Jim isn't at all sure that there is anything to approve of at all.
Until Spock turns abruptly in a barely coalesced beam outside his father's rebuilt doorstep and smoothly offers Jim his hands, drawn carefully together at the wrists in a pose that Jim has taken more than enough xenobiology classes to recognize.
Frank had wanted to adopt Jim once, before Winona went ahead and married him anyway when the precocious carbon miniature of her soul-mate said a rather loud and profound no. And for all that Georgie's response was to kick Frank and dash from the room, Jim will always wonder if it would have made a difference if he'd said yes. To Winona or the galaxy, he's never sure which.
Jim hasn't spoken to Winona in nearly a decade, since he got Frank arrested for aggravated assault and she cut off that last comm call, bruised lips drawn in a familiar line, and he's never quite gotten up the courage to call the number on the back of the tattered postcard buried in the bottom of Bones' desk drawer, but it takes him less than four seconds to close the distance between Spock and himself. Their closed palms feels a tiny bit like fate, and a lot like second chances.
Gravel crunches behind Spock's back, and Jim slowly raises his blue eyes to meet the fathomless black he knows he'll find there.
And for all that there's a hole in his chest that no amount of time will ever fill, Jim thinks it might have just gotten a bit smaller.
JTK
Jim's life isn't a fairy tale. It doesn't have a fairy tale ending. Somewhere or somewhen it already did, and maybe one storybook finish is all any version of James T. Kirk will ever get.
Still, Jim wakes in a biobed from a knife wielding Orion induced haze on his thirty second birthday to find two fingers of his left hand grasped in a bone crushing embrace and for all that his right grasps helplessly at nothingness, it feels a lot like love.
JTK
The Science Academy on New Vulcan becomes famous for conducting the first official scientific study of multi-partner pair bonds in the galaxy less than a decade after its inception.
Their findings don't exactly bring the universe to its knees, but they might just heal it a very little.