Chapter Text
Bucky does a double take.
“This is Bob,” Yelena states proudly, placing both hands on her hips with a determined pout in her lip. She tugs the tiny – he didn’t even know kids hands could be that tiny – hand she’d been gripping on for dear life and pulls the small boy forward. He gives a shy wave in return, Bucky only looks even more nonplussed. “Bob is my best friend.”
“‘Lena,” Bucky massages his temple with two fingers. He glances upward at the brightly lit, Trader Joe's ceiling, and thinks back on why he’d exactly given in on taking care of his niece for the summer. “What did I tell you about kidnapping?”
“Um…,” the six year old’s nose wrinkles and she gazes pointedly at Bucky. “Nothing!” she declares with a pointed finger at his chest. “You said something about running off but nothing about kidnapping!”
Shit. Okay, well maybe he didn’t. But he thought it was a given that you weren’t supposed to just take random kids in stores and tug them around like they were prizes. This was exactly how missing children cases began.
He crouches down to be more eye-level with his niece, who still has that determined little look on her face, reflective of her sister’s own that Bucky marvels at how alike the two really were. Still, his focus is entirely fixed on the little boy – Bob, as Yelena had called him. But given how fictitious his niece’s stories were, Bucky did have to be on guard with whatever she said.
“Hi Bob,” he says, because Bucky is a completely functional human being.
The kid blinks back large, brown doe eyes at him. “Hi,” Bob murmurs to Bucky. “Do you have mac and cheese?”
What?
Yelena’s eyes, however, go positively wide, and she almost jumps for joy right there. “I love mac and cheese!” she yells, turning to envelope Bob in what looks to be a bone-crushing hug right there and then. “My best friend loves mac and cheese too,” she tells Bucky very seriously, all while still hugging Bob in the tightest embrace possible.
Still struggling, and honestly at this point Bucky thinks Bob might not be breathing while being crushed in one of Yelena’s infamous hugs, a tiny finger pops out from his niece’s embrace and Bucky watches as Bob points down to the shopping basket in Bucky’s hand.
He looks down to see what the kid was talking about, and… ohh. It, courtesy of Yelena’s tastes in this period of her kid-sized life, being limited to mac and cheese and the occasional vanilla milkshake, is filled to the brim with instant mac and cheese boxes since, while Bucky may be better than average at cooking up a meal, time to time he still has the good grace to appreciate the heavenly being that is Instant Kraft mac and cheese. A great technique for wrangling hyperactive, no-nonsense six year olds, and an even greater way of preparing food that he knows any kid would chow down in a matter of seconds.
A small snort escapes out of Bucky’s mouth. Still crouched down, he gently pries Yelena off Bob, because god knows his niece needs to learn what boundaries were, especially if they were going to have to have a much needed talk on kidnapping other children later. “Do you like mac and cheese?” Bucky asks.
“I love mac and cheese!” Yelena repeats, a bit louder this time. She peers down at Bucky’s shopping basket, before taking out a single box of the instant stuff, and tottering back to where Bob stood, handing the box to him.
“You are my best friend,” she says, like it was one of the most commonly known things in the entire world, “so you can have millions of mac and cheese every day!”
Bob takes the box without any struggle, and turns back to Bucky, nodding his head. “I love mac and cheese,” he says, in the same quiet tone from before. Bucky has to strain his ear to even attempt to hear the kid, that, in itself could have been a gateway into a bunch of worrying that he wouldn’t have enough time to process, what with the fact Yelena had seemingly taken a kid from nowhere, and was now proclaiming that he could live off of a diet strictly of mac and cheese.
He rubs his face again, letting out one long, deep, and heavy sigh. “Okay,” Bucky nods at Bob. “That’s- that’s great kid. Say, how ‘bout you tell me and ‘Lena where your parents are, and we can have a chat with them on how we’re really sorry she’s dragged you across the store?” That last part, really, is aimed at Yelena, who doesn’t look sorry in the slightest.
“I love Bob!” she defends, glaring daggers at Bucky.
“I know honey,” he soothes. He just doesn’t have it in him to explain to her the nuances of child kidnapping. “But you can’t just steal people.”
Yelena scrunches up her nose and frowns at him. “It was not stealing,” she says plainly, “I saw him alone, and I thought he was sad! So I hugged him and then he was not anymore, so I said we are best friends now.”
Wait. What?
Bucky blinks. He looks at Bob. Bob, with his round brown eyes that… oh god, no, they seemed a little watery to Bucky, now that he thought about it. “Do you..,” he tries lamely. Come on, Barnes. You’re better than this, that annoying voice in his head supplies. “Are you lost, sweetheart?”
Bob’s eyes grow impossibly large, before the kid says nothing and does nothing for a split second. Which, in the time for that said second, Bucky takes it as an initiative to start worrying about a dozen possible outcomes for what had happened to Bob, before the kid drops the box of mac and cheese and bursts into tears.
“Oh- oh no,” Bucky rushes to offer the kid a hug, which he accepts in the blink of an eye. Bob almost knocks Bucky over with the sheer amount of force the kid had in him to and now he’s got a sobbing child on his shoulder, while Yelena stares at him with such ferocity that if he wasn’t a grown adult, he may have shrunken under the intensity of her gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice gentle. “How about we find your parents together then, hmm? So you won’t be alone, and me and ‘Lena can help you?”
“No!” Bob wails, the loudest Bucky has ever heard the kid speak in the short time they’ve gotten to meet. He balls his hands into tiny fists and starts thumping them against Bucky’s chest, tears freely flowing now. “No- no, no no!”
Yelena’s face falls. She turns to Bucky and sets her mouth in a straight line. “You made Bob cry,” she accuses.
With a wailing kid on his shoulder, and another one hellbent on getting justice for her new best friend, Bucky just doesn’t know what to do. A woman walks by the three of them, and she gives Bucky a sympathetic look that he knows just screams, ‘kids, amiright?’.
“Okay,” Bucky nods frantically, because truly, he’s at a loss of what to do here. He settles into a gentle rhythm of patting Bob periodically, in a feeble attempt to get the kid to calm down. “Can you move the basket to the side kiddo?” he asks Yelena, who narrows her eyes at him, but completes the task for him anyway.
In this strange, sort of position that Bucky’s found himself in (read: crouched down with a back ache that will definitely come back to bite him in the ass later, an upset kid still in his embrace, and head turned to try and look at his niece), he maneuvers his stance a bit, all so he can pat Yelena’s wrist with his free hand.
“Thank you, honey,” he says earnestly. He really does mean it. He knows a lot of people would have labelled Yelena as a problem child, or a very loud, problem child at that, but he loves his niece all the same. Plus, it’s his kid either way. Bucky wasn’t about to tolerate anyone saying anything unpleasant about a six year olds behavior. They’ve all been there before, anyway, haven’t they?
Bucky fixes his attention back to Bob, who seems to have calmed down from his outburst earlier. Now the kid’s just hiccuping back small sobs, and while his eyes still were glistening with the threat of tears, there weren’t any other signs for him to start outright sobbing on Bucky’s shoulder again.
He taps on Bob’s back to let the kid know Bucky was there, just in case he ever wanted to talk again. “You doing alright there, kid?”
Bob lifts his head from Bucky’s shoulder, sniffling slightly. “Don’ wanna go back,” the kid says, breathing rapidly. “Don’ wanna go back,” Bob repeats. He shakes his head at Bucky frantically. “Don’ wanna, don’ wanna, don’ wanna–”
“Shh,” Bucky says. He gives the kid another pat. “I won’t send you back,” he promises, although the bitter taste of what exactly that meant, didn’t go unnoticed by him. What exactly had this kid gotten himself into?
“Do you want to find your parents?” he tries again.
This time, Bob shakes his head in such a frantic way Bucky has to worry for the kid's neck. “No!” He cries out. “Don’ wanna go back!”
Bewildered, and really, at this point, at a very real loss of what to do, Bucky turns to Yelena. The six year old’s been watching their entire encounter from the sidelines with a strange sort of fascination slash undeterred worry, but when his gaze settles on her, she blinks back at him, impassive.
He mouths help me towards her and she just fixes a very pointed look at him.
Yelena stares at Bob, who’s still hiccuping, trying to calm himself down from his outburst, and makes up her mind. She totters over to the both of them, picks up the discarded box of mac and cheese, and offers it up to Bob like a peace offering.
“Don’t cry,” Yelena says very solemnly, “you have mac and cheese now.”
Bob takes the mac and cheese. He blinks back at Yelena with his round eyes.
She takes this as an initiative to move even closer, clambering up onto Bucky’s lap, until at this point he finds himself sitting cross-legged in the middle of the dairy aisle with two kids currently on him.
“M’sorry Bucky made you cry,” she continues, nodding solemnly. “He’s really nice but he’s not really good with people, okay? So you gotta be…,” her tiny face scrunches up in search of the right word, “understanding,” Yelena finishes.
Bob nods.
“Are you mad at him?” Yelena prompts.
Bob shakes his head and glances up at Bucky, who only shrugs and gives the kid a small smile. “I’d be mad at me too if some guy made me cry, bud.”
“Not mad,” he whispers, glancing at Yelena who nods at him in understanding. “Just don’ wanna go back.”
Her tiny face scrunches up like she’s trying to digest these pieces of information for the first time. “Go back where?”
Against his hold, Bob stiffens and a small frown makes its way to his face. Bucky brushes aside a mass of brown curls from the kid’s head, shifting his hold on both of the kids so that Yelena could comfortably cling onto Bucky too without her being in danger of slipping off. That’s when he really registers it, that he’s still sitting on the floor with two kids, one of which isn’t really his, in the middle of Trader Joe’s for the past fifteen minutes.
God. Steve is so going to make fun of him for this.
“S’not good,” he finally says, eyes welling up in tears again. “It’s cold and dark and scary-,” Bob hiccups. “And mommy fights all the time and daddy is mad and they don’t stop shouting, and–”
He gets cut off, not by Bucky, but by Yelena, practically climbing over Bucky to wrap Bob in one of her infamous, bone-crushing hugs. The two stay like that for a solid three minutes, with neither of them saying a word. Bucky just sits there, still a bit bewildered by the amount of information he’s learnt on Bob, and a simmering feeling of anger directed towards the kid’s parents, that he really doesn’t want to touch on right now. Not yet, at least.
(...Maybe he’d have a talk with Steve and ask him if he knew any good family court lawyers in the area.)
Yelena cradles the mac and cheese box between the two of them – in his haze of wondering what to actually do with Bob, Bucky realizes that the box has somehow ended up crushed between their two bodies in their embrace, so now he really has to go pay for that box of instant mac and cheese. Oh well, small sacrifices.
Bob’s been eerily silent the entire encounter, which, okay isn’t out of the norm for that kid, but still, Bucky has a sneaking suspicion that the boy’s tendency to go completely silent and only talk in the quietest of voices, wasn’t all because he was a shy kid. He watches as Bob just hugs Yelena back, and says nothing further on the topic of his parents.
Then, Yelena pulls back from the hug completely, blinking owlishly at Bob. “Are your mommy and daddy mean?”
Bucky winces at the sheer bluntness of Yelena’s question. “Yelena!” he chastises. “You can’t just ask questions like that.”
She glances up at him. “Why?”
Bob shifts slightly in Bucky’s hold, gently tugging the mac and cheese box from Yelena’s grasp. She lets him have it without any struggle, and he hugs the item close to his chest.
“It’s not..,” Bucky sighs, shaking his head. “Honey, these are sensitive questions, okay? We gotta be understanding ‘bout them.”
“Ohh,” Yelena says. She nudges Bob’s shoulder and he lifts his gaze from Bucky’s lap to glance up at her. “Sorry,” she says, and this time, Bucky thinks she might really mean it. She leans over to poke Bob’s cheek. “I don’t wanna make you cry either, okay? You don't havta answer my questions, s’okay. You are my best friend!”
For the first time, a small smile spreads across Bob’s face, and the kid lets out a half wheeze half laugh at Yelena’s words. Satisfied, his niece grins up at Bucky and he offers her two thumbs ups in return.
“You should live with us!” Yelena’s eyes go wide at this realization, bobbing her head up and down excitedly. She grabs onto Bob’s sleeve and tugs him back and forth, glancing up at Bucky. “Can he please live with us, please please please?”
“I…,” for once, he’s at a loss for words. “‘Lena-”
“Please!” his niece implores. Yelena stands up from his lap, dragging Bob up with her. She makes a big show of dusting herself off, hot pink denim shorts included. She reaches up to fix one of her pigtails that had gone askew, and fixes Bucky with a look. “He loves mac and cheese like me, and he’s nice and smart and he doesn’t like his mommy and daddy, so he can stay with you because I love you and my mommy and daddy aren’t here.”
She spreads her arms wide as if to prove her point. “And,” she adds, “I can tell Tasha all about my best friend!”
Bob pipes up from beside Yelena, “I want mac and cheese,” the kid says in such a sincere tone that Bucky almost wants to cry.
Bucky gets up from the cross-legged position he was previously in, and tries to wrangle Yelena’s concrete decision already. He crouches down, still, to be eye-level with the both of the kids and gazes at his niece. “Yelena, sweetheart, I know you want to have Bob stay with us but…,” he trails off, unsure of how to proceed.
How exactly does he explain to his kid that even if Bob had a less than adequate situation at home, it still wasn’t possible for the two of them to just bring a random kid home, without anyone alerting the authorities? Or worse, Bob’s parents themselves.
He decides to try a different approach.
Bucky glances at Bob, who shifts slightly under Bucky’s gaze. “Are there people who know you’re here?” he asks in a gentle tone. When the kid just blinks back confusedly at him, Bucky clarifies. “At home, I mean. Do your mommy and daddy know where you are?”
Bob shakes his head – a frightful, tiny action that shatters Bucky’s heart into a million pieces. “No,” he murmurs, shrugging as his gaze travels down to the floor. “Daddy was loud last night, so- so mommy drank the bad medicine ‘gain and she was yelling, and daddy was yelling back. And then they yelled at me. So I just left and ran and I-,”
“Slow down, baby,” Bucky soothes, placing a hand on Bob’s shoulder and absent-mindedly rubbing it. He was going to have a talk with this kid’s parents. Whenever the chance arose. “Do you have somewhere safe to stay tonight?”
Yelena cuts in. “You should stay with us,” she insists again.
Bob just shrugs again in response to his question, and Bucky’s already made his mind up.
He finally stands up, back cracking in protest, and he knows tomorrow when he gets up for work he’ll have a hell of a day, but for now Bucky’s content with the decision he’s made, and nods towards the pair of kids. “Alright,” he says, “who wants tacos for dinner?”
When the cashier peers over the register to glance at his kids’ antics, she lets out a quiet laugh. Yelena and Bob were in the process of helping (read: trying) Bucky carry up all the groceries from the shopping basket to the checkout counter. The fact that they both were barely even tall enough to reach halfway to the top of the counter didn’t deter them.
“Bucky watch!” Yelena squeals as she scrambles to heft herself up onto the counter and places four carrots down. She frowns when she realizes she’s left Bob back at the ground. “I’m going to jump down,” she declares, and Bucky registers what she’s about to do almost before it’s too late, and grabs a squirming Yelena mid-jump, before his niece could turn Bob into a pancake.
(Oh god.)
“I was not going to squash him,” she complains, later, when Bucky pulls her over to lecture her on the semantics of jumping from high places. “I don’t want to leave my best friend alone!”
Bob, bless him, pokes Yelena in the cheek, and says very seriously: “I don’t want to leave my best friend either.”
Later, when Bucky tucks the both of them into Yelena’s bed at night (she practically insisted that Bob take up half of her bed, when Bucky knows she’s been prone to taking up all the space when she would climb into bed with him, much to his surprise), he settles back into his couch and lets out a small, tired sigh.
He scrolls through his contacts before clicking on Steve’s number. When Bucky presses on the call button, it lets out a simple click and buzz, before Steve picks up.
“Buck?” Steve asks, confusion evident in his tone.
“Hi, Steve,” Bucky greets with a tired smile gracing his features. He adjusts his phone so that he can place it in between his ear and shoulder to lean down to grab his coffee from the coffee table.
“Everything alright over there? You and Yelena okay?”
Bucky hums. “Yeah, Yelena’s a big girl now, apparently. Last week she told me she wanted a big girl bike instead of a baby one.” He snorts at the fondness of the memory coming back to him.
Steve chuckles at that. “Just like her sister.”
“Mm.”
A pause.
“Are you sure everything’s alright over there, Buck?” Steve asks, a hint of worry in his voice. “Listen, I know you said not to worry-,” the line goes silent momentarily. “I’m here if you need me,” is all Steve says, instead.
“No- no everything’s fine,” Bucky says. “Seriously, ‘Lena and I are great. But it’s just…”
“But?” his best friend prompts.
He sighs, taking his first sip of coffee. Oh well, rip the bandage off already when possible, Bucky supposed. “Do you know anything about kids in the Brooklyn area named Bob?”