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Sam closed his eyes, leaning back into the fingers slowly combing their way through his hair. Even with some of them feeling obviously not flesh, there was nothing that could relax him the way someone playing with his hair could. He’d seen The Wrath of Khan often enough that he wasn’t too worried about missing anything on-screen, and it would help him focus better on his friend.
As expected, the fingers went still in his hair about the time Khan put Chekov and Captain Terrell under mind control. “Remember what works. Focus on my hair, get the braids to look just right.”
“Right.” It took some effort, and there were a couple false starts before Bucky got comfortable with what he was doing. “You know, the mind control thing, I was warned about and expected to have a problem with. That guy’s allegedly Russian accent though? That’s making my hand twitch.”
Sam laughed, although he did his best to keep it restrained enough that his head wouldn’t move too much. “You’ve been watching Star Trek and you weren’t expecting that?”
“Heh. Me, Steve, Nat, and Clint watched Trouble with Tribbles together a few months ago, and everyone was watching Nat so carefully to make sure she wasn’t going to get horrified by Chekov that they completely forgot about me. Tony’s still pissed about, first of all, missing Tribble Night because he and Bruce and Peter had a science thing to go to, and second, the table I broke to screw with them by pretending to be offended.” Bucky paused. “Well. Mostly pretending. Still makes my hand twitch and I don’t even know why.”
“When you guys get to The Voyage Home, you might want to have some support in place then. They go back in time to 1986 and think it’s a good idea to send Chekov to find the nuclear wessels in Alameda.” Sam let himself go into full laughter as Bucky’s hands slipped from his hair to cover his face and smother his own amusement. “How does Natasha feel about Chekov?”
“About what you’d expect. She knows her history well enough to know that just the act of including a Russian character as part of the cast of good guys was as shocking as having Uhura or Sulu there, so she’s willing to forgive them for making him such a propagandized clown.” Bucky returned to his work with Sam’s hair, getting it smoothed out. “Honestly, the only reason Tony’s pissed about the table is because we didn’t get it cleaned up as well as we thought and Pepper got a splinter in her foot from it the next morning. No furniture in the movie room is there if he’s going to get upset about it getting broken. We’ve all got our trauma that occasionally slips out unexpectedly. The day someone thought watching Princess Tutu with Nat was a good idea was… interesting.”
“Haven’t seen that one, but just from the title… ballet?” He could see how that could be a problem for Natasha, remembering the things he’d heard about her training.
“Among other things, yeah.” Bucky smiled, in a way that seemed more like a grimace. “Wasn’t exactly my favorite, either, memory issues and people being forced into roles by the story being told – literally, I mean. I’m sure it’s a great story, but I couldn’t handle it.”
“Oof.” Sam relaxed back into Bucky’s fingers working through his hair. “So I’ve always wondered… why Bucky?”
“Because I wasn’t going by Buchanan, and I don’t know if our moms all got together in the hospital or what, but I was one of five boys named James in my class when I started school. So the two boys whose families called them Jim squared off in the playground to decide who was Jim and who was Jimmy, Jamie just kept his family nickname, and I was going to fight the other James for the name until it came out that his middle name was Quackenbush and mine was Buchanan. The other boys immediately decided that we had to be Ducky and Bucky, and it just… stuck.” Bucky gave a rueful huff. “I think I got the better end of that deal. Ducky was a mean son of a bitch, so I’d have lost the fight anyway, and no one ever quacked at me.”
“Five boys named James in one class? Wow. How big was the class?” Sam couldn’t imagine. He’d run into having classes with one or two other Sams, especially if you counted Samanthas, but he couldn’t imagine that many kids with the same name.
“There were forty-seven of us in my first grade class. There was a lot of talk about hiring more teachers and cutting class sizes, and they had made some progress – my mom told me her first grade class had been almost eighty kids – but still huge by any reasonable standard.”
Once again, Sam was reminded just how different things could be between different times and places. He’d been in some schools where there weren’t forty-seven kids in his grade, let alone one class aside from athletics. “Wow. And you never wanted to change it?”
“Thought about it a couple times, did change it when I went into the service. Only other James in my unit went by Jimmy, so I could be James.” He gave a somewhat rueful huff. “And then Steve showed up, and I was right back to Bucky. The rest of the Howling Commandos might call me Sergeant, but if they were going informal enough to use James, they were going informal enough to call me Bucky.”
“Ugh, I know what that’s like. I stopped letting anyone but Dad or Dean call me Sammy when I started high school, but never could get them to stop, even after I ran away and didn’t speak to either of them for over two years. At least no one else tried it.” Much, anyway, and those people got set straight quickly – or were deliberately trying to piss him off.
“That’s good. Never really regretted that Steve brought back Bucky, kinda figured that when I got back from the war whatever of my old friends made it back too would still call me that, but it was kind of annoying that people just picked that up so quickly. I wasn’t even there to defend myself from it, Steve just made it happen while I was a prisoner of war.”
“Oof. That sucks.” Bucky made a noise of agreement.
They switched places as Kirk was discovering his son. Bucky started laughing as Sam played with his hair. “Some things never change, do they. I know Starfleet isn’t exactly military like we were, but still, soldier leaving behind a kid he never knew about is a familiar story.”
“Did you ever…?” Sam had to ask. He couldn’t help thinking of Dean when they found Lisa and Ben. Sure, Dean wasn’t exactly a traditional soldier, but if anything their lifestyle was more conducive to leaving behind kids they never knew about. It had happened to John, after all, after he’d quit the soldier thing and become a hunter.
Bucky shrugged. “Not as a soldier. Once I left New York, I was all about the guys so that there was no chance of me accidentally leaving a kid somewhere I never planned to go back to. It’s possible there was a kid in New York, but if that had happened… I’d planned on being there for them. Life just had other ideas.” Bucky paused. “Can you help me out with something? Sexuality gets talked about a lot more now than it used to and I keep running across new terms, and I’m really confused about how some of them are different from each other.”
Sam chuckled. “Yeah, that’ll happen. Let me guess, the difference between bi and pan?”
“And poly and omni. If it were just bi and pan, I could get that, now that I’ve got my head around the idea of genders beyond male and female. One for more than one but not all, one for all, and then gay and straight for only one. So, since bi is used as ‘more than one’ gender, I don’t get the difference between that and poly, or the difference between pan and omni.”
“To be honest? In a lot of cases, it’s mostly which label does the person think is the best fit. Some people use bi for attraction to all genders anyway. Pan and omni, the difference is usually pan is for where gender doesn’t matter, but omni is for being attracted to all genders but either having a preference or experiencing it differently.”
Bucky let that sink in as Sam started working on a braid for him. “So if I’m attracted to all genders, but generally prefer men when society’s not telling me I should be with women, that would better fit with omnisexual?”
“Yeah. Exactly. That doesn’t mean you have to use that label, though. And it can be situational. At Stanford, when I was surrounded by people who cared a lot about this stuff and knew things, I used polysexual. I’m not really attracted to guys, but I am to most other genders, including some masculine ones.”
“Like Castiel,” Bucky said.
“He’s… kind of a special case, since he doesn’t have a gender of his own but his body is male, but yeah,” Sam agreed. “After I left Stanford, though, any time I said I was polysexual I always had to explain what that meant, so eventually I started just calling myself bi. Less accurate, but people generally understand that one. I thought about pan, but all it took was one stupid joke from Dean for me to decide to use bi instead.”
As the end of the movie approached, Sam signaled to Bucky to switch back. “The first time I watched this after Dean made his deal with the crossroads demon, I was messed up for days. You should probably have the distraction of my hair.”
“Why’s that?” Sam didn’t have a chance to answer, as Spock nerve pinched Bones and entered the radiation-filled engine chamber. “Oh. Oh no. Steve warned me that Spock was going to die, but he didn’t say how.”
“Yeah.” Bucky hadn’t had to stand there and watch Steve freeze to what should have been death after sacrificing himself to stop the weapons of mass destruction, but the parallels were there. Sam could feel the tension in Bucky’s fingers as he undid the earlier braid and reworked it. He choked up as he always did watching the death scene. “I’ve been on both ends of this… Dean selling his soul for me, me jumping into Hell to end the Apocalypse. It’s not easy on either side.”
“No kidding. It’s not supposed to be. That’s why it’s called a sacrifice.” Bucky cleared his throat. “I’m gonna kill Steve. He was right that this is a great movie and I needed to watch it, but I could’ve used a more specific warning about Spock.”
“At least he doesn’t do it on purpose,” Sam grumbled. “Did I tell you about the time Dean told Castiel it would be a great idea to take me to see It in the theater? I walked out as soon as I realized what we were watching, and spent the next three nights having clown nightmares. Dean thought it was hilarious.”
“Ugh, that’s just rude. What did you do to get him back?”
“Promised him that my revenge would be epic, shot him significant looks when I felt the time was right… and didn’t do anything else. He broke down after four days of that and told me to just get it over with already and hit him or something.” Sam grinned as Bucky broke down laughing. “So worth it.”
“It’s good to have someone I can talk to about this shit. With the Avengers, it’s a little close to the mindset we had back in the service… suck it up, soldier, you have a job to do. And Steve is the fucking worst, even though he probably needs it more than anyone.”
“Dean, too. Calls it the Winchester Way, bottle everything up inside and ignore it.” Sam made a face. “My counselor at Stanford called it the code of silence. Took a while to break through it. Did me a world of good when it happened, although it kind of contributed to the falling out with Dean… I pushed him a little too hard to talk, he pushed back, we both went for low blows the way only brothers or people like them can. Still a good thing, and occasionally, I can get Dean to open up and talk about what’s bothering him, but not nearly as often as he needs it.”
“Can’t decide whether we need to lock those two in a room until they’re best friends or kill each other. If I weren’t so worried about the second being more likely, I’d do it without hesitation.”
Sam snorted. “Dean was a bad boy in high school. He meets Steve, he’d kill him on principle for those stupid videos.”
“And Steve would agree. He hated those videos as much as anyone else, but they were made in the War Bonds Era of Captain America. Before he got off his ass and remembered there’s more to being a super soldier than following orders.” Bucky shook his head. “Sometimes I swear the best thing I ever did for Steve was getting my ass captured to force him out of the slump.”
“Maybe, but that shouldn’t have been on you. That would be a therapist’s job.”
“Not in 1943 it wasn’t,” Bucky grumbled, which Sam had to admit was fair. “One of the many things I like better about this century, although there’s still a ton of room for improvement.”
As the credits started to roll, Sam shut down the computer. “Gonna do Search for Spock with the Avengers, or come over here? Might be triggering for you – when Spock comes back, it’s with no memory of anyone, even Kirk. Like when you started snapping out of the Winter Soldier but didn’t remember Steve on any conscious level.”
“Hmm. Might be a good one to watch with just Steve, then. Might be able to actually talk about when we had to fight each other. All I can ever get him to say about it was that he knew as soon as he recognized me that it wasn’t actually me attacking, I was being used somehow. I’ll talk to him and see what he thinks, and give you a call to let you know?”
“Sounds good. Although it may really be that simple for him – it was for me when my brother was a demon.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll feel better if we can have an actual conversation about it, though. See you next time.” Bucky wrapped Sam up in a hug before heading out.