academy au!!! i love academy aus so much
Hi! I do, too—at least, I do enjoy them, though I'm often personally tripped up by being one of the few people who thinks the Academy backstory of The Wrath of Khan is completely at odds with everything TOS ever tells us about young Kirk, and in particular his supposedly perpetual belief that his ingenuity and determination would let him evade facing loss and death forever as symbolized by the Kobayashi Maru cheat is ... um, bullshit. Kirk faced down what seemed Spock's inevitable death at effectively his own hands at least three different times in TOS because of who he is as a person, and by all accounts in the show already was that person at the Academy, but even in fanfic, the Paramount franchise hammer throws a long shadow over the genre.
So just for my own tastes, it's difficult to find K/S Academy AUs quite for me, since most are a) ultimately very much more TWOK than straitlaced, grim, always-fights-fair young TOS!Kirk and/or b) very much more about Kirk as an expressive and nurturing love interest in Spock's drama despite this being the era of TOS Kirk's life when he was most overtly somber, harsh, bullied, and a bit clueless (most of which lasted into at least his mid-20s). And I thought, well, in the time-honored tradition of fic writing, write the damn fic you want yourself: no movie retcons, no "he had a ~reputation at the Academy ;)" fanon (me: for getting stuffed into lockers?), just third-year Academy cadet Spock tripping over a different bullied nerd than himself: humorless plebe Jim Kirk being "hilariously" tormented by Finnegan.
And as a result, Kirk and Spock get to know each other and become friends far earlier, but Spock is a few years ahead of Kirk and gets snatched up onto the Enterprise early, so even with Kirk's internal TOS timeline requiring him to have super-speedrun the curriculum, Spock is absent for most of his time there and their courtship friendship for years is mostly ... EPISTOLARY!!!!!
