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“The first step to permanently closing a bond is to have fun and be yourself,” Winona says as an introduction to doing exactly that.
Spock is not so sure she is right. Jim is strongly amused by his thoughts for some reason, and he thinks his mother is right, or at least not wrong.
Spock does not really understand. If something is not wrong then it is right, no?
Jim shakes his head and Spock feels his bond with Winona opening just the tiniest bit to relay the exchange.
Winona smiles. “You’ll grasp grey morality soon enough, Spock. Let’s focus on your lesson for now, okay? Even if Jim is the only one who will use it at the moment, you might find this lesson useful at a later date.”
Spock feels chastised. Jim does not, despite being the one who interrupted her.
“The actual first step to closing a bond is feeling it out. As an exercise I’d ask both of you to mind out all the bonds you have and test their boundaries without actually yanking on them.”
Spock opens his mouth to ask what is this ‘yanking’ when he feels a tug on the end of his bond with Jim. He closes his mouth.
“What was that, Spock?” Winona asks and he winces inwardly.
“It is nothing, merely a question that Jim has already answered.”
Winona rolls her eyes and must share something with Jim because he chuckles inside his head, still he compartmentalises it in a shielded area of his head.
(Spock knows that is a habit reaction to sharing any sort of connection through the bond with his mother, a shield meant not to be penetrated by his father, and as such he does not feel a single negative emotion about it.)
Spock’s mother-in-law chuckles audibly and turns to him to address him. “I abhor being kept out of the loop, and with you two bonded so strongly you basically share a brain it will be impossible not to be.” Ah yes, that would be an issue. “I imagine your parents might be miffed as well with you communicating without words more than not.” That would also be an issue. “So, idea: Since me and your parents are going to co-parent Jim anyway as per t’yeh’tes sep-wafikh-tor ekwak fam-shau potau | unbreakable promise (1), why wouldn’t I co-parent you too, just less officially?”
Oh. “Splendid idea,” he obfuscates his emotions not to express them.
Jim makes a sound akin to choking. It takes Spock a second to realise he is stopping himself from laughing, eyes bulged out and face contorted into a grimace.
“Please never lie like that again,” he chokes out and schools his features. His face is back to perfectly blank state within half a second and Spock feels a pang of jealousy. He knows how strongly Jim feels, how emotional he is, has access to all his memories, and yet he is able to assume a perfectly respectable mannerism even after breaking it. Continuity is what saves Spock from appearing unseemly, but Jim could round a corner, laugh, and come back perfectly stone-faced.
“Spock, do you want to talk about why you’re against the idea?” Winona prompts him gently.
“I already have two parents. I do not need another,” he manages, despite the embarrassment he feels.
Winona nods, and Spock thinks that will be it, she will not try to change his mind. But he feels Jim’s bond to her open and they converse for a short moment, before Jim imparts a questioning prompt at him, which he accepts.
Jim pushes images and thoughts and memories that are his own and not his own and many come from memorials scattered across America, which Winona took him to against George’s wishes. Memorials of equality movements. Anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-ableist, pro-feminism. The memories become his own and he sends a questioning prompt as to why he is supposed to know them. They are a human relic of anti-freedom and anti-equality, anti-equity policies. Similar events have never been a thing on Vulcan as far as he knows.
But then Jim shows him his own opinions on the matter, quickly and efficiently deconstructing his pre-existing perceived notions of idealisation of vulcan society, and how everything looks in colonies (at least the ones he has visited) and current day Earth with comparison metrics, statistics and survey results. A phrase appears in his mind allowing him to describe the rant Jim shows him as one he had ‘locked and loaded’.
Spock feels and he feels deeply and he knows that what he just said can be understood in the same way as anti-polyamory or anti-gay rhetoric on Earth, and goes against not only the human way but also old vulcan way that was preserved in colonies. Why would a child need more than two parents? Why would they need more than a father and a mother? Or anything other than a father and a mother?
Because there is no need and it takes a village to raise a child, and everyone’s needs are different, and no one should be able to dictate what you are doing with life unless you are hurting someone and breaking the social agreement.
“Oh,” he says, “I acknowledge I was wrong.” He feels embarrassed. He is supposed to be more logical than that, he is supposed to—
Jim does a mental equivalent of ruffling his hair up to get his attention. No, is all he says for a moment before thinking a bit, about numerous conversations with Winona, and even more numerous conversations with his father. Punishment, constant belittlement— Spock is appalled that a grown half-vulcan had less emotional control than his seven-years-old quarter-breed child.
Jim raises an eyebrow at the last part and it’s enough for Spock to know he misstepped again but before he can even gather his thoughts enough to identify the problem and apologise, Jim presses a distinct impression of their age at him. “We are children, Spock,” he says out loud, “No need to beat yourself up over every minor misstep.”
“Pot calling the kettle,” Winona murmurs, clearly amused and Jim stares her down impassively. “If you knew what it means to be a child, you wouldn’t have been calling T’Pau by yourself and greeting Amanda with a dungi-rom(2).”
Spock doesn’t know what surprises him more. The memory of Jim going over pre-Surakian traditions in his head, the fact that he used the dungi-rom, or the fact that he apparently was the one to reach out to Tela’at(3) T’Pau in lieu of his father. He feels like he’s going to get surprised often.
“So, let’s get back to the exercise at hand. Can you feel out your bonds?”
Jim closes his eyes, so Spock does the same, and they focus on their bond first, both of them on each end. Despite not seeing it directly, Spock feels Winona’s eyes on him. He only realises it’s because he feels Jim’s betazoid abilities reaching out of him, even when he’s in mild meditative state. He realises that no matter how deep Jim goes, this ability persists like a window into the outside world.
I think that is why you’re unable to reach full meditation, he informs Jim who mimics tilting his head into their headspace.
Fascinating, Jim replies. It hasn’t occurred to me that this would be the thing stopping me.
Their bond unfurls suddenly, undergoing a growth spurt like it has infrequently since it started forming. Spock notices strands coming off of the main rope of it. He squints. His bond with his parents does not look like that. His bond with Jim looks almost… splintered. He instantly becomes panicked and goes to inspect his bond with his mother. It is shallow, as not to hurt her, but it is a single rope. He inspects his bond with his father. It is a single rope as well. He goes back to his bond with Jim. It is so many strands, it really looks like it splintered and is falling apart and—
He realises Jim is amused. Everything stops as Jim pushes the feeling of calm and peace on him.
That’s just how betazoid bonds are, he informs him, the closer we are physically, the more ‘splintered’ the bond will look and the furthest we are, the more invisible it will look, except we are both part vulcan, which means that our bond also has this core that persists unchanged no matter the distance. Our bond will act differently depending on how far away we are, but the core will stay no matter the distance.
Spock takes a deep breath and exhales. All is good.
Jim opens his eyes and nods. Spock does the same.
Winona’s eyes crinkle even as her face stays impassive. A vulcan smile, impressive for someone not vulcan. She does smile with her mouth eventually, but it seems that the kunli-ak is so ingrained into her reactions that she does it before smiling. He hadn’t noticed before this moment but for all her expressiveness, she is weirdly… timid. She clearly knows how to hide her expressions, she just chooses not to. Just like his mother except somehow… weirder, wilder, like emotionalism is a weapon she wields.
Jim catches the thread of his thought and wraps it around a string of queued memories. Spock goes through them quickly, to reach a conclusion that Jim’s father was mightily uncomfortable when faced with a powerful display of emotions. He then presents a thesis, supported by observations—that Winona Pavlov-trained her husband to ensure their family unit’s continuous survival, making him feel rewarded when she expressed her emotions in a more restrained way.
The bond unfurls again, momentarily distracting him, and more and more of additional strands appear. He chooses to stop focusing on the bond before it drives him into panic again. It is illogical, but it is so different from the other bonds he has it is causing an irrational emotional response. He goes back to thinking about Jim’s father—the reason of this entire lesson.
Because Jim would be breaking his familial bond with him in a few minutes, an hour at most.
It would not be hard, Spock reckons, judging by the strength of the bond. It is, simply put, weak. Pathetic really, in the most literal sense of being pathological. No vulcan would be proud of maintaining such a bare-bone bond with any of their close family members. If the degree of familiarity is closer than three steps, and the person has not been banished, it is frowned upon to not maintain at least a standard-closeness bond. The one Jim had with his father was weaker than that which Spock shared with his teacher—a mandatory bond required to ensure the students actually focused during assemblies and group-assignments.
It was weird. It was alienating. It could be snapped in half even without the explanation Winona would soon provide. The only reason they were learning how to do it properly, was not to alert George of the bond breaking earlier than absolutely necessary, so he cannot force his way through to anchor it properly. Because that was apparently something he has done before, when Winona tried to leave him.
Spock tries not to have opinion on people’s character before meeting them or hearing both sides of the story, but he knows there must have been a reason for Winona to tell such a story, and he has felt her bond with Jim. Unforced, thriving, beautiful, in agreement. It makes it easier to villanise George, yes, but he cannot see Winona as the hostile manipulating party in this family unit.
The ability to do such thing as bond-anchoring would also explain how come Jim had such potent telepathic prowess and power. Spock felt him all around himself, wrapped like a tight shawl around his consciousness. Spock has always prided himself on being the strongest presence in pretty much any bond. He has honed this ability in himself, palling only next to Tela’at T’Pau herself.
He felt small next to Jim.
It was not that Jim made him feel small as much as his sheer presence pressed him down until he was small. Not in any active way, in this inevitable way gravity pushes objects back to the centre of it, the way diffusion melds two chunks of metal together over the years.
He wonders how his own neural pathways will develop. If they will ever be equal. It is theoretically plausible. His own mother, human in origin, had developed telepathic abilities due to being bonded with his father, and stable telsu bonds were scientifically proven to lead to bondmates becoming equal in certain ways, including in telepathic abilities, but he cannot think of a way to reach this volume of mental presence without constantly stimulating his brain’s telepathic and bonding centre.
Which is not happening because no one in his school likes him enough to form even a lightest of bonds.
Jim does not comment, damningly, even though Spock made no attempt to shield this train of thought from him.
"Okay, time for the actual mechanics of breaking a bond,” Winona pulls him out of his musings. “You’re going to locate all the memories anchoring you to your sperm donor and mark them, then look for the core of the bond and prepare to flex it backwards, like the opposite of a yank, then you’re going to put a shield on his end, and cut all the links to his person. He might as well be a featureless face in the memories. His will stay unaltered, but yours will be muddy until you see him again.”
Well that is terrifying.
Still, Jim must have expected that, because he nods and closes his eyes. Spock observes as he marks up his memories efficiently. He takes special care to mark all of them, not just the anchoring ones, and Spock marvels at the efficiency of the endeavour. He’s done within three point eleven seconds.
“I’m ready,” Jim says, then, when his mother nods, Spock feels him take literally a blink of time to shield violently, in the most demeaning separation way he has ever seen a shield to appear in, and starts snapping the bond. That goes on slower, but it is done just as George snaps through the shield, and then blinks out of the range Jim can feel.
The bond is broken.
Winona gets up and scoops Jim into a hug, and he lets her. Her eyes fill with tears and Spock feels the onslaught of feelings she pours into Jim even through the weak shield his bondmate puts up to spare him.
“We’re free,” she whispers, and he hums.
“Affirmative,” he chokes out, letting a single happy tear slip.
Spock, could you tell your parents that we’re done? Mother will need emotional support, he says, surprisingly calm for what just happened.
Of course, he rushes to reply and get up, and then a thought touches him and he hesitates, about to voice his thoughts before deciding to just present his thoughts up to Jim by pressing their consciousness together.
Jim’s shielding wobbles and gives up and he mouths a thank you.
Satisfied, Spock leaves to get his mother, as he feels his father submitting the correct documentation to get parental rights over Jim in Earth’s embassy already.
“Ko-mekh?” he calls out and she rounds the corner, book in hand. “Your presence is wanted now.”
His words are awkward, but she understands and goes, squeezing his shoulder as she passes him.
Jim emerges from the room barely a few seconds later, face composed but insides in turmoil.
So? Meditation like you suggested? He asks, and Spock nods. As the usual meditation room is currently taken by their respective mothers, he starts leading Jim to his room, before pausing.
It is not weird, is it?
We’ll be living together anyway, Jim shrugs and urges him on with a gesture.
They settle on the floor of Spock’s room easily, Jim leaning back on the side of the bed and sighing deeply. His throat works silently for a moment, then another tear falls, then another. He curls up in place and puts his head between his knees, hiding his tears.
Spock does not know how to comfort him, but he does not think that is what Jim wants at the moment. Instead he enters a light meditative trance, and beckons Jim’s mind presence closer, so they can both categorise their thoughts and feelings and compartmentalise.
Jim’s mind is like a tempest, or a hive; thoughts buzzing and storming until the emotions threaten to overfill him. Still, with Spock’s encouragement he deals with it all quickly. The thoughts are categorised into neat shelves of his inner palace, and feelings are inspected and rationalised, until they stop bothering him as much, until finally he disperses them with tried and trusted vulcan discipline training.
Soon they are both breathing in synchronisation.
Jim’s brain starts tinting with another emotion and for a second Spock worries it is the volatile ones again, but instead he finds gratitude and happiness.
That is why I sought out a betrothal with another vulcan, besides the legal protection and other benefits, like appeasing George, he muses. You did not try to placate me or comfort me, just helped me tame it down.
Spock feels his expression go lax, as does Jim’s. He thinks of tamping his happiness down and getting his expression under control into the tight mask it should be in public, but then he thinks of the fact Jim knows him better than anyone else now, via the access to his very katra, and decides against that. He can allow himself a moment to relax, when no one, but his bondmate is watching.
1. t’yeh’tes sep-wafikh-tor ekwak fam-shau potau a mouthfull, yes, but plausible to say. it means agreement which has to be true and cannot be broken, alternatively the unbreakable promise, but directly translated it's of truth agree to forever not broken keep because it sounds plausible in Vuhlkansu, that's all. Now, what it actually means is an agreement that if broken has legal repercussions, as well as health one because it's an agreement you do in front of an adept in the eye of law(4), binding it with your katra your mind. ▲
2. Dungi-rom — I made it up from dungi (VLD: “to decide on; choose; to yearn for; desire; to decree, dictate, or order; to resolve with a forceful will; determine (verb)”) and rom (VLD: “being positive or desirable in nature; not bad or poor”) it’s a formal greeting done in a gesture, by someone of lower social standing before negotiations. ▲
3. Tela’at — From VLD: “elder; title of respect for an advanced aged Kolinahru”. ▲
4. Adept of the eye of law is essentially someone who does mindmelds to ensure the unbreakable promise (see above) or ensure the testimonies are correct.▲