Work Text:
“Hey, kids, come in here! There’s some mail for you.” Bucky shut the door, stomped the snow off his boots, and set the small cardboard box, adorned with stamps from whatever part of central Europe Natasha was in this week, on the kitchen table. “Aunty Nat sent us a package, and it says we all have to open it together.”
Pounding footsteps on the stairs heralded the arrival of the two smallest members of the Odinbrood, followed by a suspicious thump, and Loki skidded in just ahead of Thor, bursting through the doorway at top speed. “Is it cookies?” he demanded. “I hope it’s cookies.”
“I hope she sent us all wrist-stinger things,” Thor said. Natasha hadn’t so much let him try shooting one of her stingers the last time she’d visited as she hadn’t stopped him—“Relax, Barnes, he is the god of thunder, you know”—and Thor had been fascinated by them ever since.
“She’s not gonna send you weapons for Christmas, dorks,” Hela said, following behind the twins at a more sedate pace. “Weapons are for birthdays. You both know that.”
“You know, every so often I think about what it would be like to live in a family where nobody goes around the house armed to the teeth,” Steve said mildly, rinsing off the last of the plates and setting it in the dish drainer.
“You’d be bored to tears,” Bucky said dismissively. “Let’s get this package open. Uh-uh,” he said sharply, as Loki grabbed for it. “You know the rules. You have to make it fair.”
Loki glowered at him, but just as quickly, he turned to Thor with his right hand in a fist and his left palm flat. Thor narrowed his eyes and nodded, and both of them smacked one fist against the opposite hand three times, quickly, before Loki held his hand out flat and Thor held two fingers out sideways. “Damn it,” Loki moaned. “How’d you know?”
“You always do scissors except when it counts, so I’ll do rock,” Thor said, “and then when it does count, you do paper.”
“He’s got you there, Lokes.” Bucky handed the package to Thor, who ripped off the tape and turned the box over, scattering packing peanuts across the table and floor. Fenris watched silently as they fell, then heaved his bulk up from his dog bed by the wood stove, sauntered over to sniff one and, before anybody could stop him, ate it. Steve briefly closed his eyes, considered yelling at the dog, and instead chose to hope it was one of the natural, biodegradable kind and resigned himself to dealing with the aftermath later if it wasn’t. Neither of the boys even noticed, because Loki was already grabbing for the other thing that had fallen out of the box: a lanky doll in a red suit, with a Santa-style hat. He flipped it over, looked at its face, and visibly recoiled. “What the hell is that?”
“Loki, that’s been two Swear Jar words in less than five minutes, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to get to three,” Bucky said mildly, but he was frowning at the doll. “Can’t argue with the sentiment, though. What is this thing?”
“There’s a letter,” Thor said, lifting a folded piece of paper out of the pile of packaging. In true Natasha style, the paper was solid black, and the message was written in silver gel pen, although this time she’d broken out the red and green pens to add a festive border of hand-drawn Christmas ornaments, packages, and one improbable figure that Steve eventually decided was supposed to be a reindeer.
“What is that, a poem?” he asked. That wasn’t like Natasha at all.
Thor nodded. “The Elf on the Shelf,” he read, in his best third-grade declamatory voice:
I’m the Elf on the Shelf! I’m a Christmas tradition!
I’m like your Aunt Nat! I’m a spy on a mission!
But my job is better than her job, it’s true,
Because my boss is Santa, and he sent me to watch you!
“Dear God, that’s a crime against meter,” said Steve, and Bucky shushed him as Thor continued.
“Your first task from Santa is to give me a name.
Make it a cool one. Don’t put me to shame.
Your next task from Santa is find me a spot
To sit and watch who’s being good and who’s not!”
“What kind of dystopian surveillance state bullsh—” Steve began, before a metal elbow caught him swiftly in the ribs. “Ow.”
“Finish it up, Thor,” Bucky said, and Thor wrinkled his forehead in concentration and read,
“While you are asleep, I’ll watch over the house
And move around quiet and quick as a mouse.
In the morning, let me stay where I’m found,
To watch everything that happens all around.
On Christmas Eve I’ll go back to the North Pole’s ice
And tell Santa if you’ve been naughty, so you’d better be nice.”
“Ugh,” said Hela, rolling her eyes. “This is gonna be one of those non-optional Earth holiday traditions, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s definitely a weird concept, but if your Aunt Nat sent it, we should give it a shot.” Bucky picked up the elf doll and looked at it thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “it’s actually kind of a cute little thing.”
“This from the man who brought home a space aardvark,” Steve said, to no one in particular.
“It’s supposed to watch us?” Loki said, dismayed. “And it’s gonna tell on us if we mess up?”
“It’s not real, Loki,” Thor said, looking puzzled about all the fuss.
“How do you know?” Loki demanded. “It could have magic on it, for all you know. This is the kind of thing I’d do if I wanted to get inside somebody’s house and see what was going on.”
“Loki, I absolutely forbid you from disguising yourself as an evil doll or any other inanimate object in order to insert yourself into other households,” Steve said, because he’d learned the hard way that this was, in fact, the kind of thing that needed to be specified.
Beside him, Hela had started to grin evilly. “Yeah,” she said, “if I was Santa and I wanted to know if any kids who lived there did stuff like stabbing their brother, this is exactly how I’d do an infiltration. I’d tell ‘em the rules so it’d be fair, but I’d also make it seem like it wasn’t real, so they’d let their guard down.”
“Aaaaaa,” said Loki.
“Calm down, Loki. This is just a weird little holiday thing that your Aunt Nat thought would be funny,” Bucky said. “And you’re not going to stab anybody, so you wouldn’t have anything to worry about anyway.”
“I don’t like the principle of it,” Loki said.
“You’re only saying that because it works on Dad when Steve says it,” said Thor.
“So? It can still be true!”
Bucky was looking at his sons speculatively. “I think we better do what it says,” he said, carefully straight-faced. He picked up the elf doll and carried it into the living room. The rest of the family trailed after him, watching with various degrees of enthusiasm as he arranged the little doll in a jaunty pose on the mantel. “There,” he said. “Now it just needs a name.”
“Fury, Nicholas J.,” Steve muttered.
“Shh,” said Bucky.
Thor won naming rights by throwing rock to Loki’s scissors (“see, that time I knew you were trying to throw me off track”), and the elf was christened Buddy, to the dismay of Hela, who hadn’t wanted to participate until she realized how tragically uncool the end result was going to be. Steve, it turned out, had never made time to see Elf (“Oh my God,” said Bucky. “I was in a glacier,” said Steve. “You’ve been out for more than twenty years,” said Bucky, “you don’t get to blame getting frozen anymore, you’re just a pop culture snob”) so that was the evening’s entertainment sorted. But Steve noticed that Loki made a careful note of exactly how the elf was situated on the mantel before he went upstairs to bed, presumably so that he could check on whether the elf had indeed moved during the night.
Loki was nine, and Steve was well aware that the boys were closing in on the age where Christmas would lose a lot of its wonder, probably not fully regaining it until and unless they had kids of their own. It seemed like a shame to rob them of one last round of genuine Christmas magic.
Steve was also, notably, both surprisingly stealthy when he wanted to be, and the household’s only regular early riser.
“Okay, so are you gonna tell me what’s with the shit-eating grin and Barnes not speaking to you, or…”
Tony left the sentence dangling as he handed Steve a plate, and Steve dried it and put it up in the cabinet. He’d figured out early on that volunteering for cleanup duty after dinner at the Stark house got him out of at least half an hour of board games with the kids, which—look, it wasn’t that he didn’t like spending time with them, but Pepper’s assurances that they were learning valuable math skills while making fond lifelong memories in the process got a lot less convincing around the third or fourth time a game board got flipped and he had to fish the little plastic Monopoly houses out from under the sofa. “Are you familiar with a thing called an Elf on the Shelf?” he asked.
“Yeah, uh, creepy little plastic Christmas spy? Happy gave us one when Morgan was a kid. Pepper moved it around the house for a couple weeks before we all got bored with it, probably still in a box in the basement somewhere. Why?”
“Natasha sent us one, and Buck and I were having a philosophical disagreement about it,” Steve said. “I decided to make a point.”
Tony put the next dish down and stared into Steve’s face. “Say more right now,” he said.
“You remember those old cartoons that used to start off with an exterior shot of a house at sunrise, maybe a rooster crowing, and that music that’s like daaa, da-da-daa da-da-daa —”
“Rossini’s Morning Song, yeah, and then usually there’s a bloodcurdling scream—you saying you pranked Barnes before he had his coffee?”
“Left it on my side of the bed, so it was the first thing he’d see when he opened his eyes. Turns out Bucky isn’t as relaxed as either of us thought about the whole ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping’ schtick.”
“Well. There is a history there.”
“Yeah, I thought of that later. After I stopped laughing. That may have been a little too late.”
“I’m getting that, yeah. Need a couch to sleep on for a couple nights? Mine’s good and broken in.”
“I’ll be fine on our sofa, thanks.”
Tony shook his head. “You know, I’m eternally impressed by just how much, for the first two decades of my life, Dad was holding out on me about what an evil little shit you were.”
“It’s possible I’ve gotten worse with age.”
“Like a bad cheese,” Tony agreed.
“Steve.” Bucky stuck his head through the kitchen doorway. “You about done in here?”
“Oh, you’re speaking to me again now?”
“Look, there’s moral principle and then there’s the fact that the kids are dividing up for Pictionary and my best shot at not getting walloped by my own children is to get you on my team.”
Well, it was true that Steve could reliably mop up the floor with the others when it came to Pictionary. “I’ll be right in.”
“Yay, family togetherness!” Tony said, with a bright, wide grin that vanished as soon as Bucky left the doorway. “Rogers,” he said, lowering his voice, “I will pay literally any price you can think of for video footage of shenanigans that make Barnes look at you like that some more.”
Steve chuckled, but he shook his head. “Sorry, Tony, but I think I made my point and then some, and I think it’s time we take this down a notch and let the elf go back to its intended purpose of traumatizing our impressionable young children.”
“Always gotta ruin all my fun,” Tony said disgustedly.
Steve put up a decent showing for Team Barnes-Rogers anyway, at least until he pretended to get completely stuck on the word cafeteria in order to throw the game to Hela and Morgan (because when there were two teams of adults and two teams of kids, one of the younger teams should win, and there was no helping Thor and Loki when they kept eating up their drawing time by yelling at each other.) By the end of the evening, Bucky had thawed considerably. His snarking at Steve had returned to positively companionable levels by the time they were home and the kids were in bed, and when Steve took a chance and proceeded to go to their bed, Bucky didn’t banish him. They were lying next to each other, Steve reading a book and Bucky taking his turn in whatever complicated online game he was playing long-distance with Shuri, when Bucky said, without looking up from his phone screen, “Sorry I was kind of a jerk to you today.”
Steve felt a little of the tension go out of him at that. “I did start it.”
“Natasha started it. I don’t think I get to pretend I’m surprised by you at this point. Are we good?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, reaching over to squeeze Bucky’s shoulder. “We’re good.”
Ten minutes later, lying in the dark, Steve opened his eyes. “Buck?” he said.
“Hmm?”
“You thought of something even worse to do to me, didn’t you?”
“Goodnight, Steve,” Bucky said, in a voice full of sleepy affection, and Steve knew he was screwed.
Steve’s notebook was open, and he chewed on the end of his pencil as he looked at his list:
Places That Damn Elf Has Shown Up
- Freezer
- Medicine cabinet
- Top of bathroom door
- Behind sun visor in minivan
- Dishwasher
- Boot
Underneath, a second heading read Ideas, and there was nothing underneath it.
It hadn’t all been targeted at him, that was the thing. Bucky had set up some surprisingly cute little scenarios: Thor had definitely gotten a kick out of finding the elf making a snow angel in spilled sugar on the countertop, and even Hela hadn’t been able to keep from laughing when she found it “sledding” down the banister on a lovingly painted cardboard replica of Steve’s shield. But it was getting to the point where he had to go find the damn thing before he started doing any activity that might involve opening a door or picking something up. Hell, at this point he was halfway afraid to walk under a light fixture in case it fell out on him.
He was about to give up, close the notebook, and walk away when Thor poked his head around the doorframe. “Steve?”
“Yeah, Thor? What’s up?”
“I want to talk about the elf,” Thor said. “I think it’s kind of freaking Loki out.”
“Has he said something to you?” Steve asked.
Thor shuffled his feet. “No, it’s just, I have a feeling about it.”
The thing about the alleged Odinbrood twins, Steve thought, was that Thor might be saying that because it was true, or Loki might have said something and Thor was trying to save him the embarrassment of coming forward, or he might be saying it because he was freaked out about the elf and didn’t want to admit it. “You know, we could just… quietly retire that thing,” he said, only feeling slightly bad about the fact that he’d kind of been looking for an excuse already.
“No!” Thor said. “Loki might just think it really did come to life and go back to the North Pole and that’ll make it worse.”
Not for the first time in his brief parenting career, Steve decided that he might officially be out of his depth. “Okay,” he said, “what did you have in mind?”
Bucky emerged from the bedroom the next morning in his usual sleepy daze, but at the bottom of the stairs he stopped abruptly, brushed hair out of his eyes, and glared. “Thor,” he called, in the somebody’s-in-trouble voice that was similar enough to Winifred Barnes’s to send a shiver through Steve’s bones nearly a century later. “What did we talk about with the hammer?” he said, when Thor’s bedroom door creaked open. “I said it stays in your room all the time unless you have permission to take it out, bud.”
Thor came to the top of the stairs. “I didn’t take it out,” he said, with perfect honesty. “It was in my room when I went to bed last night.”
“Then how did—oh, motherfu—” Bucky caught himself abruptly and shouted, “Rogers, get your star-spangled tail in here and move this freakin’ hammer right now!”
“Can’t hear you, Buck,” Steve called back, all innocence. “What is it, you need a spider killed? Just trap it under a glass or something and I’ll get it after breakfast.”
“Now, Rogers!”
“The eggs will burn if I leave them,” Steve said, setting the pan on the stove and turning the burner on.
“Guh—you—” With Thor listening, Bucky, unable to commit to any further Swear Jar words, was audibly flailing. “What did I do to deserve you?” he shouted toward the kitchen.
“Something great, I assume,” Steve said cheerfully, cracking an egg into the skillet.
“Why is everybody yelling?” Hela’s voice cut in from upstairs, slightly muffled; Steve’s guess was that she had her pillow over her head. “Why is anybody even awake? It’s Saturday, Dad!”
“I can’t explain it, baby girl,” Bucky called back, with a sigh. “You’ll have to come see for yourself.”
Hela didn’t, not right then, but another set of footsteps pattered down the stairs, and Steve smiled; Thor moved like a herd of elephants, so a light tread like that was definitely Loki. The footsteps stopped abruptly, and Loki said, very quietly, “Whoa,” when he came upon the same thing Bucky had: Not far from the foot of the stairs, the lower half of the elf’s body poked out from under Mjolnir. “Dad?” he said uncertainly. “Is Santa okay with murder?”
Steve reached for a jar from the spice rack, smiling. “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” he hummed to himself, very softly.
“Now, you’re sure you’re okay with this, right?” Bucky said, as Hela carefully arranged the partially flattened elf on the kitchen table. As far as he knew, she hadn’t actually seen any of the Frankenstein movies, so telling her that this scene was taking him back to a dark Brooklyn theater in 1931 would probably be lost on her.
“Yeah, Dad, it’s okay. Aunt Wanda keeps saying I’ll be less freaked out when I have to do magic if I practice when it doesn’t matter.” She looked at the elf critically. “It’s been a couple hours, so even if it had somehow survived being smashed by the hammer, brain death would’ve set in a long time ago.”
Bucky opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He was the one who’d chosen to kidnap a six-year-old alien death goddess because she’d looked at him sadly, so while he hadn’t anticipated statements like that being part of his regular life, he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t brought it upon himself. “Cool,” he said. “Go for it.”
“Okay.” Hela closed her eyes, and Bucky felt the weird electric-charge sensation of her magic make all the hairs on his right arm stand up. A green glow surrounded the elf doll, and its flattened hard-plastic face slowly expanded and then suddenly popped back into its previous shape, while the rest of its squashed top half gradually reinflated. “Hey, that’s great,” he told her. “Seriously, it looks as good as new. I had no idea you were getting so good at this.”
“I wish I could do it with more stuff,” Hela said, almost shyly. “I can still only do things that are shaped like people, though. And they have to be, you know, at least symbolically really definitely dead, not just inanimate, or it doesn’t work at all.”
“Honey, you grew up around so many magic users that you have no idea how amazing it is to a regular human when you do any of this stuff,” Bucky told her. “Especially not one who was born in 1917.”
“Really? You always kinda seem like you’re taking it in stride when people do magic around you, Dad.”
“Nah, it’s just that after you spend enough time around guys opening interdimensional portals and ladies throwing cars around with their brains, you sort of just develop a ‘sure, this might as well happen’ kind of attitude. It’s different when it’s you. I mean, you were born with some pretty serious magical chops, but I’ve also seen how hard you’ve worked to figure it out. I’m really proud of you, I want you to know that.”
“Aw. Thanks, Dad,” Hela said, and was about to lean in for a hug when she hesitated. “Um,” she said, as the elf shivered and then sat up. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?” Bucky raised his eyebrows. “Are you not doing that on purpose?”
“I’m not doing it at all! I just wanted to, like, restore it, not revive it, but think I gave it too much juice.” Hela was watching the elf with no less fascination than Bucky; it seemed to be trying to get to its feet, moving with jerky awkward motions, and its eyes had taken on a green glow. “It’s so much smaller than anything else I’ve tried this with, it must need less power, which means… oh, wow, I think I really overdid it.”
“Can you pull some back?”
“Um, maybe. I need a minute to figure out how to—aaah!”
The elf had finally gotten up on its wobbly little legs, and now it was lunging straight at Hela. Bucky’s body responded to the threat to his kid almost without conscious thought: there was a swish and a thump, and the green glow dissipated, leaving the doll just a doll again—albeit now a doll that was pinned to the scarred surface of the kitchen table by the six-inch knife from Bucky’s ankle holster.
“Oh my God, Dad, I’m so sorry,” Hela said, breaking the sudden shocked silence that had fallen over the kitchen. “I didn’t mean for… I just… sometimes things come back wrong, and I can usually handle them when they do, but—”
“It’s okay, kiddo. No harm done.” Bucky felt that he was doing a pretty good job of sounding calm, given how hard his heart was pounding. “Your Aunt Wanda would probably say it’s better to play around and figure out the, uh, nuances of stuff like this before you’re in a high-stakes situation. I think we’ve lent some credence to the theory that this thing is cursed as heck, though.”
“Yeah.” Hela poked it experimentally. When nothing happened, she pulled the knife up by its handle, slid the elf off the blade, and smacked it against the tabletop a few times. It reacted exactly the way a few scraps of fabric and a little molded plastic ought to, namely, not at all except for bouncing gently when it hit, and Hela let out her breath and said, “Okay, it’s back to being inanimate for real now.”
“Right,” Bucky said. “So we’ll just put the elf back up on the mantel for now and, uh, maybe take a break from moving it around the house for a couple days. Oh, and do me a really big favor and don’t tell Steve about this.”
“Make me the same promise about the twins, and you have a deal,” said Hela.
It was another four nights before the elf moved again, and happily, the last time wasn’t of its own volition. Three nights, however, had been enough time for both Steve and Bucky to stop obsessively checking the mantel every time they walked through the living room, so it wasn’t until the middle of the next morning that Steve stopped in front of the fireplace, stared for a moment, and said, “Buck, I thought we agreed that this has stopped being funny.”
“Wh—” Bucky came into the living room, followed Steve’s gaze, and went pale. “Kids,” he called up the steps, “I need you all to come down here for a minute,” and when they did, he said, “Listen, nobody is in trouble about anything, but if someone moved the Elf on the Shelf, it’s really important for you to tell me where you put it so we can go check and make sure it’s still there.”
“Why would it not—” Steve began, knowing his alarm was completely irrational but not, in this household, prepared to dismiss it outright. But it was Loki who was avoiding Bucky’s eyes and looking down guiltily at his toes as he scuffed his feet across the carpet.
“Loki,” Bucky said, and that was all it took for Loki to break.
“Okay, I did it,” he said, “I stole it and I took it and I know I’m not supposed to, but I did it for a good reason and I’m not sorry.”
“Loki, save the moralizing and tell us where you hid it,” Bucky said wearily.
Loki looked up, over Bucky’s shoulder, and checked the wall clock before his shoulders marginally relaxed. “I put it in the cheese shipment that went out this morning,” he said.
Bucky blinked several times before replying, “You did what?”
“I took the teleporter up to the ship,” Loki said, “and I put it in one of the boxes you packed to go out in the next shipment that I knew Uncle Rocket was gonna pick up today, and it’s ten o’clock which means he already did, and I didn’t look at what the label on the box said, because I didn’t want you to be able to go get it back. And I’m not sorry,” he reiterated, “because I didn’t want to hurt it, but also, if it is real, it’ll probably take it years to get back to Earth and tell Santa on us for all the things we did to it.”
Bucky let out a heavy sigh, walked over to the sofa, and patted the cushion for Loki to come sit down next to him. “You too, Thor,” he added. “Okay, kids, look. I’m the one who let this thing get too far, so it’s time for me to make it right. See, Santa Claus is just a story. It’s an Earth tradition, and it’s one of the things I have really good memories of from when I was a kid, so I wanted to do it with you guys too. But Santa isn’t a real person who lives at the North Pole, and he definitely doesn’t have elf spies going into people’s households and working for him.”
“Oh,” said Loki, thoughtfully. Beside him, Thor was frowning, but not looking particularly distraught. “I’d kind of been wondering about that.”
“Yeah,” Thor agreed, “there’s a lot of stuff in the story that doesn’t add up. Like even with magic reindeer, how would Santa get to every house in the same night? There are a lot of houses on this planet.”
“So how come you’re telling us now, Dad? I mean,” Loki said, with a stern frown that looked amazingly like Steve’s disappointed expression, “if we’d known for sure that the elf thing was just a game, you and Steve both could’ve saved yourselves a lot of trouble.”
“There are some things that are worth the trouble, kiddo,” Bucky said. “I knew you two were both getting to about the age where kids stop believing in Santa anyway, and I guess I just wanted you two to have one more really magical Christmas. I mean, not magic like Asgardian magic, but magic where you feel like anything’s possible.”
“I think we’d rather know the truth,” Thor said. “Right, Loki?”
“I guess,” Loki admitted, grudgingly. “I did kinda like the idea of the flying reindeer, though.”
“Well, you’re taking this better than I thought you might,” said Bucky, “so thank you for that.”
“I’m just glad to know the elf isn’t loose in the house somewhere,” Hela muttered. Steve shot her a look of pure bafflement, and she said, “Don’t ask, Steve. Seriously.”
“I’m more interested in knowing what exactly made your brother decide the elf had to go,” said Steve. “Specifically, about whether there were plans in the offing that required getting rid of surveillance devices before they were carried out.”
“I’m not up to anything, Steve,” Loki said, with dignity. “Is it so hard to believe I just wanted all this drama to be over?”
There was a brief silence in the living room before Bucky said, “Honestly, yes. I’m pretty sure you and ending drama are two things that have never occurred in the same sentence before, Lokes.”
“Fine,” Loki said irritably. “I wanted the drama that wasn’t about me to be over, okay?”
“Now that I believe,” Bucky said, grinning. “I—hang on.” His phone was buzzing in his pocket. “Oh, speak of the devil,” he said, checking the screen. “It’s a video message from your Aunt Natasha. I guess she’s back from whatever godforsaken place she picked up that elf in.”
“Put it on, Dad,” said Hela, eagerly. “I wanna find out if she’s coming for Christmas.”
Bucky duly held up his phone, and the kids clustered around him, watching as Natasha appeared on the screen. She looked well-fed and uninjured this time, which was always a relief. Bucky was pretty sure he wasn’t the only one who’d been hinting at her that she should give up the field work and spend more time stateside, and she was still hedging, but she had admitted that spending time with the kids was getting to be an awfully big draw. Now she was standing in what looked like the terminal of Dulles Airport with a Santa hat tugged down over her ears.
“Hey, Barnes-Rogers household,” the video addressed them cheerfully. “I’m back from Europe, and I have some good news for you. I’m taking you up on your invitation and coming up for a Christmas visit.”
“Yes!” said Thor, pumping his small fist. Natasha had long ago promised him that the next time she saw him, there were going to be Krav Maga lessons; he couldn’t wait.
“I have time off until the end of the year, so I was thinking of staying a couple of weeks this time,” Natasha continued. “If it’s not too much of an imposition—”
“Every time, she acts like we’re not dying to have her here,” Steve said, already reaching for his own phone to text her that he’d be happy to pick her up from the airport.
“—and I can’t wait to see you all. Oh!” Natasha added. “And Hela, I saw your Snapchat that you all got my Christmas present. That elf was so cute, I just couldn’t resist. I hope you’ve all been having a lot of fun with him, and I can’t wait to get there and hear all your stories, and see what kind of mischief the little guy is getting into. Buh-bye now!” she said, and the video ended, leaving the living room suddenly, chillingly silent.
Steve locked eyes with Bucky over the kids’ heads. “She put a tracking chip in that thing,” he said, “didn’t she?”
“And waited until it was safely off-planet to send the video,” Bucky agreed grimly. “What are we gonna do about this?”
“I have an idea,” said Loki. “Can we get another one of those elfs? Like can you buy them online or something?”
“Oh, they’re annoyingly easy to find,” said Steve, who had already done his research. “But I think the jig is up. I mean, I’m a hundred percent sure she knows it’s off-planet now.”
“Yeah,” Loki said. “I’m counting on it.”
Four days later, the Barnes-Rogers clan piled into the minivan to pick up Aunt Natasha at the airport. And back at the house, half a dozen Elf on the Shelf dolls were tucked under the comforter on the guestroom bed, waiting to welcome her home.