Sometimes Jim Kirk wakes up in the middle of the night and has to pause to regain his bearings because it feels like reality has just spun out of control and he is in some weird dream. Or perhaps a parallel universe.

It's not that he is unhappy. It's that he is happy, and sometimes it freaks him out.

He has to ask himself how a screw-up genius from Iowa got to where he is now. The Captain of Starfleet's flagship, the USS Enterprise, an icon of the Federation, a husband…

That always makes him pause.

He is someone's goddamned husband.

He supposes that he is more accurately a bondmate, although they had both consented to perform the marriage customs of each other's cultures.

Which meant that James Tiberius Kirk is legally married by both Terran and Vulcan law to the most beautiful, intelligent, wonderful man in the entirety of the universe.

It makes his head spin.

Sometimes he has to take a deep breath, and remind himself that this is all real, that it is not a dream, and that he really is awake.

And sometimes he needs to tighten his arms ever so slightly, to hold the man that lays in his embrace even closer despite the heat of that pale body, to bury his nose in the silky black hair that crowns his lover's head, to lightly trace the hard muscles of his abdomen and run his hands over the soft skin and slender frame that conceals a strength much greater than his own.

When he does this, the world seems to right itself, and everything is okay. Because even if he doesn't fully understand how he got this lucky, the fact remains that he is.

And as long as he continues to be able to sleep alongside his own Vulcan furnace, everything will be fine.