#monjustmon

Janice Rand is doing this in her own way; he admires and loves Areel all the more because his guile and silver tongue have never slightly worked on her, and she takes the initiative yet is respectful of his boundaries, allowing him to be soft-eyed and affectionately romantic with her (he does things like kissing her hands); Edith is blatantly if decorously courting him as much as the reverse if not more so; and there was clearly a mutual give and take between him and Jan Wallace, even in their break-up (my personal headcanon is that Jan was the blonde lab technician but even if not, this holds).

Even Janice Lester probably seemed like this type to begin with: certainly physically, and she was driven, focused, and ambitious (and in a warped way still is). She's in the sciences like most people he's into; and pretty clearly was the dominant force in their relationship even before it turned into an abusive situation (the relationship lasted a year, so the timeline allows for it). She idealizes a domineering, aggressive masculinity that he evidently fell short of, and she's contemptuous of him for not fitting that ideal, even though in terms of physical strength, he could have easily overpowered and attacked her. She's half-convinced herself he wanted to but never had the spirit to do it ("you were afraid. you were always afraid") but is also outraged that he managed to get away from her control—she's basically the worst-case scenario of his type, not a completely different one.

Contextually I think the year they were together likely occurred during his 2-3 years as an Academy student, before he got immediately transferred to space service without the usual teaching gap that people like Finney had to go through (probably only reinforcing her projection of resentment onto Kirk). So they would have been no more than 19 or 20 when they got together, very young.

Aside from these, Kirk has no unforced romantic encounters in S2, only femme fatale situations, and in S3, the amnesiac Kirk readily goes along with marriage to a woman he barely knows because she seems nice and people tell him he should. Odona deliberately pursues him, and once it seems they're going to be stranded alone together, he's receptive; even in the weak "Requiem for Methuselah," Rayna does the classic gentlemanly flirtation of guiding his movements at pool and defiantly broadcasting her interest.

Basically, I think Kirk could easily fall like a ton of bricks for Spock at any time, and would fall quickly. He uses sex appeal a lot, especially in S2; he is more straightforward and emphatic about his desires and lack of them in S3 and the "femme fatale" scenarios shift towards much more overtly violating territory in S3 as a result, but, when he's not using his desirability as a tool to navigate some desperate crisis, he doesn't fall in love often, just quickly and in a very swept-off-his-feet way that markedly contrasts with the other scenarios. That's definitely what would happen with Spock IMO.

However, I don't think younger Spock would be at all clear about his feelings, and I think he's very unlikely to pursue Kirk in anything like the way that Kirk's canonical old flames and those he uncomplicatedly falls for in TOS do. I feel like Spock's emotional baggage, if anything, would only be worse at the time.

—FWIW, I am not remotely convinced by the SNW apologetics about how he would be expressive and emotional in his younger years because he's trying out his human side and we don't bear in mind that it's earlier and he hasn't evolved into his final form of TOS Spock!! And so on. IMO S1 TOS Spock is very obviously taking his first baby steps towards the rootedness and sense of belonging and commitment he shows in S3, and every indication is that he had been profoundly isolated and deeply unhappy prior to that, and never really experienced anything like Kirk's icily outraged defense of him in "Balance of Terror" before that moment. The way he's treated in "The Galileo Seven" is a much more typical Day in the Life of Spock; there's a reason that Amanda is so pleased to discover Spock has a friend when Kirk indignantly sticks up for him wrt Sarek.

Anyway, the point is, young (basically married and deeply repressed) Spock is absolutely not in a place where he would take any kind of initiative in any kind of ... anything with Kirk (I do not get where the "he's not yet gay slutty Spock of TOS" is coming from, early TOS Spock would rather die than reveal a desire). Even befriending Spock would be a challenge in their younger days, I suspect.

And moreover, while I think Spock would also fall hard and fast, even if he were constitutionally capable of being receptive at that point and was letting on à la S3 Spock, young Kirk is himself not really in a place where he'd likely even notice. Especially if he knows Spock is married/betrothed (which he might very well not know, Spock being Spock—but if he did, I think the ethical issues would come screaming back into relevance).

However. All of this isn't to say there is no scenario where I could believe that a romance could happen between early career Kirk and slightly older Spock, just that I think there'd need to be more to the AU than their paths crossing early.

Maybe Spock is involved in the initial investigation into the tragedy of the Farragut, and the XO canonically on record as saying don't listen to what Lt. Kirk tells you, he did nothing wrong and nothing he might have done would have changed a thing draws Spock's attention to 23-year-old James Kirk, traumatized by mass slaughter again.

Or maybe Spock is the lab technician, rather than the unknown blonde, when Gary Mitchell plays matchmaker vs Kirk as the terror of PHIL101 (I don't think I've yet seen teacher!Kirk K/S scenarios where Kirk's subject isn't some hyper military thing or STEM, but I can more easily imagine super intense sharp-edged Lt. Cmdr. Spock who is almost entirely withdrawn into his turtle shell and super intense sharp-edged hyper-scholarly humanities guy Lt. Kirk hitting it off).

Maybe it's an even more off-the-beaten-path-of-TOS-canon AU scenario as a result of some other change that involves T'Pring eloping with Stonn (or whomever) when Spock ran off to Starfleet, and a year later, 20-year-old Spock is stepping in on behalf of bullied 17-year-old brand new cadet Jim Kirk (then a mere four years out from surviving starvation and genocide). That would shift to a primarily epistolary romance after Spock ships out and maybe it's easier for Spock to be a bit clearer and Jim a bit less oblivious in writing (I fully believe Spock would find Ensign Kirk's conduct wrt Finney's mistake 110% correct and his support might well slow Kirk's tendency towards isolating himself while projecting composure and charm, while Kirk would intentionally and unintentionally drag young Spock out of being mired in his own head for so long).

There are any number of other possibilities, too. Maybe Spock has a transitional period between missions when he's ~27 and decides he might as well get Academy credits for his PhD while on leave. Given that TOS only ever indicates that Kirk was a teacher (and a straitlaced, demanding one, not the "I'm the Cool Mom" type of prof), not Spock, and it's just one of the many Kirk qualities grafted onto Spock in the various ST movies, it could be fun to have a scenario where Spock is the genius student who thinks he's too advanced for the required philosophy course, and Kirk is the strict regulation-loving nerd at 24, teaching his class for only the second time, still processing [insert horrors] and in extra think-or-sink mode. What happens after the course? Did Kirk destroy Spock's perfect GPA? Lots of fun ways that could go, too, where they're more mutually challenging than the usual.

But basically, all of this is to say that I can't see it happening given where they were at emotionally and circumstantially at earlier ages (according to TOS) with no change other than their paths happening to cross. There needs to be a bigger change baked into the premise to make it plausible for me that Spock is going to be proactive enough and reveal enough of his own feelings, and the two of them thrown together enough, for young Kirk to "make a move."