A/N: You all blew. my. mind. with the amount of reviews you left me on the last chapter, so for you reading pleasure I give you the longest chapter yet. Specially written for those of you who wanted to know the truth behind Winona v. Pike. Thanks for reading!

The good captain's scotch sat before him completely ignored. Number One sat beside Pike, stiff and unbearably awkward, occasionally breaking her pose long enough to fix death glares at the back of her captain's skull while he sat there with this head in his hands ignoring everything. Amanda had been valiantly attempting to made polite conversation with Number One, but the woman seemed incapable of returning the effort. After spending more than a decade surrounded by Vulcans, who could make conversation (albeit stuffy conversation) with their worst enemies, Amanda couldn't help but be mildly concerned that these were some of the best negotiators Starfleet had in their ranks.

Amanda was the consummate hostess, despite her guest's discomfort, and had seen to it that they were both fed and watered while they officers unknowingly waited on Sarek to return with the boys' status. After several minutes of Number One replying to her questions in nothing more than grunts Amanda gracefully rose and clicked the call button on the comm beside the door. Within a minute one of the many Embassy workers stepped silently into the room and without so much as an eyebrow twitch took orders from Amanda to prepare quarters for their guests. (Amanda kept her amusement to herself that the Vulcan help was better at keeping their emotions to themselves than the Vulcan Ambassadors.)

Number One traced Amanda's movements across the room, subtly reaching for a phaser that wasn't there. Long years of practice had taught Amanda how to project calm and safety to those with a happy trigger finger. "I hope it's not too presumptive," Amanda demured, "but I've arranged rooms for the both of you should you decide to spend the night."

At that, Pike finally lifted his head and placed a calming hand on Number One's knee before she snapped out something about how they were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. "Thank you," Pike replied in a hush.

Amanda sat down across from him, taking in Pike's tired eyes and decided to interfere. "I'm a mother, Christopher."

Pike twitched an eyebrow, "Yes, ma'am. I noticed."

The corner of Amanda's mouth quirked in reply and she continued, "That means I've had some experience dealing with entractable boys, if you'd like to talk about it."

Pike huffed and ran his hand through his brown hair once again, causing it to jut out in all directions and make the captain look painfully young. "I screwed up and Jim's suffering for it." Number One's knee started to bounce incessantly, which was her only sign of her discomfort at Pike discussing this; though whether she was upset with Pike dicussing it with Amanda, or discussing it at all, Amanda wasn't sure.

"If I may ask, how exactly do you believe you've 'screwed up'?"

"I shouldn't have left him to stay with his damn mother in the first place!" Pike snapped.

"Ah, yes, because the Federation justice system is always more than willing to separate the widow of a war hero from her newborn son. I can't imagine why you didn't start proceedings immediately," Amanda replied, which was finally enough to get Number One to smirk.

Pike lept to his feet and started pacing, and Amanda couldn't help but notice the similarities between James and the man before her. Pike murmured something under his breath, and after a very polite "Pardon me?" from Amanda he snapped back, "She wasn't George's widow!"

Pike realized a half a second too late what he'd shouted, and froze with a flush. Amanda quirked her eyebrow in a perfect demand that he continue, and Pike stuck out his chin in reply, silently refusing. Number One rolled her eyes and said, "Cap was in love with Kirk."

"Number One!" Pike hissed, but Amanda swiftly turned back to him in disbelief and demanded, "What?"

Pike's flush deepened and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, 'What's so odd about that?' "How could you be in love with George Kirk and have no one know about it? That's the sort of story humans talk about for years after the fact, even longer given how Captain Kirk died."

"Even if people talked about it, how would you know?" Number One questioned. "You live on Vulcan, surrounded by Vulcans who don't have it in 'em to gossip."

Amanda smirked at the other woman and replied, "They don't consider it gossip, they consider it 'intelligence gathering'."

Number One's jaw dropped and she muttered, "Well I'll be damned. And with that Vulcan hearing they must know practically everything."

"Indeed. The moment it became apparent that Jim was going to become a permanent fixture in our lives Takeru, our chief of security, found out everything there was to know about the Kirks and anyone they've had associations with."

"Why?" Pike asked.

"You cannot properly protect someone if you do not know from where the threats may originate." Sarek answered evenly from the door.

"How's Jim?" Pike asked before Sarek even had the chance to properly enter the room.

"He is well. I have guided him through a meditation intent on rebuilding his shields and he has found some measure of stability. I have left my own shields around his mind to preserve his mental peace and I anticipate a 65% chance that he will sleep soundly through the night. Should he not, I will be aware of it and proceed to compensate for such a disturbance."

"Where is he?"

Sarek paused for the barest of moments before replying, "He has chosen to remain with Spock." Amanda could see that Sarek wanted to offer some justification for allowing them to stay together, probably once again in the same bed, but he refrained.

Pike puffed out, "That's good," and dropped back down beside Number One. "Thanks for looking after him Ambassador, I don't know what we would've done for Jim on our own."

"Indeed?" Sarek quirked an eyebrow and took his place beside Amanda much more gracefully than Pike had assumed his place beside Number One. "I would seek to know how James came to listen to the audio recording of his father's death."

Amanda gasped, and didn't feel embarrassed at all for her human response.

Pike slouched back in his seat and explained, "The fight with the curator earlier was about the last few minutes of audio from the Kelvin's black box. After the Fleet reviewed the whole destruction they turned those minutes over to Winona's exclusive control and deleted every copy in existence except for the one she had access to."

"I find it unlikely that Starfleet would so willingly part with anything in their possession."

"You and me both Ambassador, but there was nothing to be learned from the audio. They still have all the records of the orders given, and every last key stroke Jim made fighting off the Narada, but the audio didn't matter to them." Pike drew a deep breath and finished, "It was just George saying goodbye."

Amanda bit her lip to keep from saying something unpleasant and let Sarek take the lead instead. "Judging from James' reaction and his repetition to Spock of specific elements of this file, I presume that James was unaware of the contents of the audio."

"Sitting down and listening to the audio with Jim or telling him anything at all about George would require more patience then Winona's ever been capable of," Pike snorted.

Sarek raised an eyebrow, "I see. Given what I I know of your personality I find it unlikely that your distaste for Lieutenant Kirk stems only from your... association with her husband."

Pike actually grinned at Sarek's word choice and replied, "No wonder you're an ambassador. That was the most non-offensive way I've ever heard to ask me if we had a fling. I'm totally keeping that one for my own future use."

Sarek's eyebrow went higher. "I lack sufficient data to determine whether your association with Captain Kirk could qualify as a 'fling'."

"How about a tryst?" Number One smirked.

"No." Sarek stiffly replied.

"Really? What about a rendezvous, or better yet, an affair?"

Amanda smiled ay the teasing but interrupted before Sarek and Number One could get warmed up, "Captain Pike doesn't seem like the sort of man to have affairs."

Pike thunked his head back against the back of the couch and replied, "No, but life would be very different if I was. Though I'd have had to convince George to be that sort of man as well, and that's unlikely."

Sarek and Amanda both sat in silence, letting the quiet draw out until Number One elbowed Pike in the ribs and gave him a look that demanded he just tell them the truth already. Pike heaved out a put upon sigh solely to irritate Number One, and explained. "So, short version. George was my best friend, but he went to the Academy when I was 13 and met Winona the first day. George was 16, she was 18, and she decided the first time she saw him that she wanted to marry the infamous, illegitimate Kirk son. George, being the gentle, trusting, idiot that he was, didn't realize she wanted him.

"Later, when George was in his third year at the Academy, I realized he wasn't just my best friend, I was half mad in love with him. George said he'd been waiting for years for me to be old enough to figure that out." Pike stopped to give the barest of smiles at the good memory before he continued.

"To Winona, I went from being the irritating best friend of the man she wanted to actual competition, and she hated me. Not gonna lie, she'd spent three years spending every class of every day of every week trying to get my boyfriend to sleep with her, and I hated her too. They ended up on the same ship after graduation and she kept trying, but George loved me. He loved her too, that's just the kind of open-hearted guy he was, but to him she was a best friend, and I was a husband."

Pike's rambling half-smile twisted into pain as he confided, "I insisted we wait until after I graduated from the Academy. He'd already been out in the field a year when I joined up, and wanted to make a name for myself, not as George's husband. He understood that. Hell, George always understood."

Pike seemed to realize he'd stopped and cleared his throat before barreling back into the plot. "Anyway, we tried to see each other every shore leave he had, but one time when he was spending the night alone on some pleasure planet, Winona went out to a bar and picked up a guy who looked like George and got herself pregnant. Whether or not it was an accident was the source of many arguments between George and I. Either way, she turned to her best friend in desperation about what both the Fleet and her father would do to her for having a kid out of wedlock, and George married her."

Pike caught Amanda's stifled gasp and he replied, "Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. He gave me a whole speech about how it didn't have to change anything, it was just to protect Winnie and her son, and how her family was so religious they wouldn't take care of the baby if they knew she'd gotten herself pregnant on shore leave. It's taken me years, but now I can see why George did it. It's nothing less than he would've done for me. Though," Pike snorted, "I didn't take the news well at the time.

"I broke it off with George, didn't talk to him for months, and that was enough time for George to fall madly in love with the whole situation. George liked love, and he liked marriage, and the thought of being someone's father lit up his life like nothing had before. I didn't speak to him again until after Sam was born, and by then their marriage wasn't fake anymore."

Pike sounded so forlorn that it was all Amanda could do to keep from wrapping her arms around him and comforting him like she did with Spock. "I was 19, I handled it like the stupid, brokenhearted kid that I was, and every time I went on a date, or spent the night in someone else's apartment trying to lose myself, Winona made sure George found out from one of the younger crewmen who used to be our friend. I can't really blame him for moving on when it sure as hell looked like I had."

Chris trailed off into silence until Number One gently prodded him, "And then, Cap?"

"Then? Then we tried to be friends. So long as we ignored everything except the two of us we fit together rather well. I still lost it when he tried to talk to me about Winona, and the day I found out she was pregnant with a son that was actually George's I got so drunk I couldn't remember my own name. Then he died, and I ignored every Kirk on the planet, including the one in this building who looks and sounds just like George. Which is how we got here, with Jim finding out shit that he should've known years ago, he should've been rocked to sleep at night being told how much his daddy loved him, and he shouldn't have had to learn that George was the only thing his mother wanted, and without him, Sam and Jim don't matter." Pike spat out the end of his story with pained bitterness.

Neither of the women knew what to say. Number One had wrangled the story of Pike several years into their service together with a bottle of bourbon greasing the way and she hadn't honestly expected her Cap to share the story with strangers. For Amanda it had been so long since she had comforted a human with a broken heart that she was out of practice.

Oddly enough it was Sarek who spoke the words neither woman could quite find. "I grieve with thee."

Pike's head shot up and he stared at Sarek in disbelief. "It is a traditional Vulcan expression of shared grief."

"Yeah, I just, um... wasn't expecting that."

"Should Amanda have married another man and born him a child my grief would have been overwhelming. I would have had the tenants of logic to console me, but you have born your grief alone. Given the increasing interdependency of your godson and my son it is only logical that you should be informed that I mourn your loss with you, and I lament that you have had to bear it alone."

Sarek consoled him with such understated fervor that Chris was surprised by how much Sarek's words touched him. Before Pike could scramble together something to say, Sarek cocked his head to the side, as though he heard something the rest of them weren't privy to. Sarek excused himself with a nod and an 'I will return shortly'.

"Does he always run out of the room after saying something that blows my understanding of Vulcans all to hell?" Number One muttered.

Amanda smiled back, "He does have a gift for dramatic timing."

"He didn't just make something up so he could avoid the Cap botching a heart to heart though, did he?"

"No, given his immediate departure I would guess that he felt something from Jim."

Pike started up out of his seat saying, "I should go-"

Amanda waived him down, "No Christopher, it's probably nothing more than a bad dream and Sarek is just fretting."

"And if it's not?"

"You would do him more harm than good at this moment."

Pike slumped in his chair, wanting to be offended that she would think he could ever be of harm to Jim, but not having the energy for it. Number One smacked him on the back of the head and said, "Don't be an idiot, Cap. I'm psi-null and I know you're pissed. What do you think is going to happen when Spock takes a look at you? And the kid is smart, he probably won't even need psychic interference to know something's wrong. You can't calm the kid if you're not calm in the first place."

Pike turned to her and muttered, "How in the hell did you get so good at this?"

Number One just snorted in reply.

#######

When Sarek stepped silently into Spock's room he was... baffled. Given that this was a state uncommon for a Vulcan such as he, Sarek thought he could be forgiven for freezing just inside the doorway while he assembled the facts before him in a logical manner.

First: James was crying. Though Amanda - with her human fondness for unnecessarily specific descriptors - would most likely say he was sobbing. Given the tumult of James' mind over the last few minutes Sarek had expected to find James in an emotion state. However, his expectations had not developed beyond that point.

Second: Spock was... hugging James. However, Spock had his arm and legs wrapped around the other boy, cocooning Jim in Spock's strength while the little human buried his face in Spock's shoulder and shook with tears, Sarek was not positive that 'hugging was an accurate description.

Third: given the grief that was pouring off the child, Sarek wondered how Spock could stand to touch him.

Spock tilted his face up from where he was whispering soothing words in James' ear and caught Sarek's gaze. Spock was crying as well, eyes the same brown as his mother were glassy with tears and almost pleading with Sarek to make it better. Sarek immediately left off his recitation of the facts and strode over to the bed, using his Vulcan strength to lift both the boys into his arms. He abandoned his Vulcan dignity and sat down on the middle of the bed, leaning against the headboard and tucking the boys against his sides.

Jim snuggled himself against Sarek and sobbed all the harder, though he kept one hand wrapped around Spock's wrist. Spock sagged against Sarek with freedom from the tumult of Jim's mind coming as a relief. Sarek thought about shifting them again to break their one point of contact, but then Spock twisted his hand to grasp Jim's wrist in return.

Sarek blamed Amanda entirely that a small part of him mourned that soon Spock's psi-sensitive points would become sensitive in another way, and the boys would no longer be able to cling to one another as they seemed so fond of doing. Sarek chose to leave the illogic of permitting Spock to indulge in this at all for meditation at a much later date. Amanda would say that Spock was happy and nothing else mattered, and in this moment, Sarek could not bring himself to disagree.

Eventually James stilled and with a sniffle apologized for interrupting whatever Sarek had been doing. "I would not abandon you to your nightmares, James."

Kirk froze and tilted his head back to look up at Sarek with petrified eyes. "Did you see them?" he whispered.

"The nightmares were vivid, so you shared images with me as well as the emotions."

James flushed and tried to pull away, muttering his embarrassed apologies, but Spock clenched tighter on his wrist and refused to let go. "You are being illogical, Jim."

"I made your dad sit through my stupid dreams, Spock!"

Sarek shifted Jim back to his place along Sarek's side and replied, "You cannot make me do things I do not choose to do myself, especially as pertains to psychic contact. If I did not wish to share in your pain James, I would have removed my shielding from around your mind and left you to bear it alone."

"So you're not, like, mad or anything?"

"Of course not, James. Now sleep, I will keep the nightmares at bay." Jim buried his face in Sarek's shoulder and Sarek felt the tension slip from his small body, but that sensation was nothing compared to the blinding gratitude that Spock felt for his father's choice to behave in so human a manner. Considering the peace of the boys finally sleeping beside him, Sarek found he could not regret the decision either.

A/N: I'm sure some of you disagree with my perception of Sarek, and after watching only XI I would disagree with me too. But I just watched The Search for Spock and Sarek was being illogical all over the place, and admitting to it. I didn't realize how tender Sarek might have been to kid!Spock and the tenseness only coming later. In case you were wondering, that's the way I'm seeing it.

Thanks for reading!