Chapter 2: Devil's Bargain
The silence that followed Dante’s challenge was brittle, charged like the air before a lightning strike. On the viewscreen, Tony Stark’s face hardened, his earlier shock calcifying into something more familiar: armored skepticism.
“Let’s cut the bullshit, Morningstar,” Tony said, his voice losing its distant, tinny quality as he leaned closer to his own microphone. The image on the screen shifted, showing him now in the observation room, leaning across a steel table littered with holographic files and tablets. He tapped a digital folder labeled ‘NEPHILIM’. “I’ve seen your energy signatures, and they’re giving my quantum computers nightmares. Literal error messages in Aramaic. You want out of this cage? Prove you’re not gonna raze Manhattan looking for your kid.”
Dante didn’t blink. “You built a murder-bot that tried to end the world, Stark. Don’t lecture me about collateral damage.”
Steve saw it then—the subtle shift. Dante’s posture, which had been a mix of exhaustion and defiance, coiled. It was a minute tightening of the shoulders, a slight drop of the chin. Steve had seen it in Italy, 1944, right before Dante had put a colonel through a wall for threatening to court-martial Bucky over nothing. It wasn’t just anger. It was the calm, terrifying focus that came right before the explosion.
“Let me out,” Dante said, his voice dropping to a low, resonant pitch that seemed to vibrate in Steve’s teeth. “Right now. You don’t believe what I am? Fine. See for yourself. I’ll give you a five-second head start.”
It was a threat. Pure and simple. Steve knew it. He knew the tells.
“Tony, stop,” Steve said, his voice cutting through the building static. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to.
On the screen, Tony opened his mouth, a retort ready, then closed it. He leaned back, crossing his arms, his eyes flicking from the contained figure to Steve’s reflection in his own glass. He gave a short, sharp nod. A stand-down.
The tension in Dante’s frame didn’t leave, but the hellfire flicker in his eyes dimmed from a blaze to a simmer. He was still looking at the screen, at Tony, but Steve could feel the focus split.
Steve took a breath, redirecting the energy in the room. He asked the only question that mattered, the one that made all the cosmic horror grimly, painfully personal. “What’s his name, Dante? Your son.”
Dante’s gaze slid slowly from the screen to Steve. The defiance bled away, leaving something raw and utterly defenseless. For a second, he looked exactly like the young man who’d shown Steve a faded photograph of his mother, his bravado gone.
“Lucien,” Dante said. The name was soft, almost reverent. Then his eyes hardened again, swinging back to Tony’s image with a renewed, cold ferocity. “If they raise my son. If they train him. And if he’s anything like me…” He let the sentence hang, the implication expanding to fill the sterile chamber. “We’re all fucked.”
Tony uncrossed his arms, placing his palms flat on the table. “Big ‘if’. Also, ‘they’? You mean your daddy and his hellfire homeboys? Forgive me if I’m not ready to sign off on a supernatural rescue op based on a scary story and a name.”
“It’s not a story,” Dante shot back, the chains of light flaring as he leaned against them. “It’s a prognosis. You think this is power?” He gestured vaguely at his own body, at the tattoos. “This is controlled. Measured. I had to learn control or I’d have torn myself apart. Lucien won’t have that. He’ll have their lessons. Their rage. His power, unfiltered, straight from the source they’ve been scraping samples of for centuries. You wanna talk nightmare math for your computers? Run a simulation on that.”
“So we just let you go? Unleash you on the world, trusting you’ll only burn the right people?” Tony’s voice was rising again. “Your credibility’s a little shot, demon-boy. Centuries of being Hell’s hitman kinda voids the warranty.”
“I didn’t have a choice!”
“There’s always a choice!”
“You think I wanted it?” Dante’s roar was sudden, physical, making the containment field shimmer violently. “You think I enjoyed becoming what I am? They broke every bone, Stark. They melted my mind down and reforged it. The choice was obedience or oblivion, and oblivion looked pretty good for a solid century! But I didn’t take it. You know why? Because somewhere, in all that nothing, I remembered what it was to have someone look at you like you weren’t a monster. Like you were just a guy. And it was a memory of a memory, but I clung to it. That’s the only thread that held. So don’t you stand there in your tower and lecture me about choices.”
Steve watched Tony. He saw the moment the engineer’s arguments met a wall not of logic, but of a pain so profound it short-circuited debate. Tony looked down at the data on his table, the nightmare signatures, then back at the furious, broken creature in the cage.
“Tony,” Steve said, his voice quiet but final. “Shut up.”
Tony’s head snapped up. He stared at Steve, incredulous for a second. Then, the fight drained out of his shoulders. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “Fine. Okay. Jesus.” He looked back at Dante, his expression grim, stripped of its usual irony. “We help you. Or, we try. On our terms. With safeguards. And you do not get to go off-leash. Are we clear?”
Dante let out a long, slow breath. The hellfire in his eyes guttered out, leaving them a exhausted, storm-grey. “Crystal.”
Steve nodded, a weight lifting from his chest only to be replaced by a heavier, more complicated one. “Alright then.”
He stepped closer to the containment window, close enough to see the faint, intricate details of the tattoos, the old scar along Dante’s hairline from a HYDRA interrogator’s rifle butt. “But I have to bother you with one thing first.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed, wary. “What?”
Steve shook his head. “Just… wait. Okay? Wait here.”
A ghost of the old smirk touched Dante’s lips, devoid of humor but full of understanding. He gave a single, slow nod. “I’m not going anywhere, Steve.”
Steve turned and walked toward the door, the hum of the cell feeling less like a threat and more like a sad, constant song.
Steve pushed through the heavy door into the corridor, the sudden silence of the hallway feeling like a physical pressure change. He pulled the phone from his pocket, his thumb hovering over Bucky’s contact. He didn’t think. He just pressed call.
It rang twice. “Steve? Everything alright?” Bucky’s voice was calm, but alert. It was the voice of a man used to calls at odd hours meaning world-ending problems.
“I need you to come in,” Steve said, his own voice tighter than he intended. He leaned against the cool wall, closing his eyes. “To the containment wing. The new one.”
A pause. “Right now?”
“Right now.”
“...Okay. Be there in ten.” Bucky didn’t ask why. That trust, that instant compliance, sent a fresh wave of guilt through Steve’s gut. He ended the call and slid down the wall to sit on the polished floor, waiting.
The wait felt like hours. Footsteps finally echoed down the hall, deliberate and familiar. Steve looked up as Bucky rounded the corner, his leather jacket worn soft, his metal hand tucked casually in his pocket. He took one look at Steve’s face and stopped.
“You look rough,” Bucky said, his brow furrowing. “What’s going on? Is it another incursion? Something cosmic?”
Steve pushed himself to his feet, his joints feeling old. He met Bucky’s searching gaze. “Just… try and prepare yourself. Because it’s going to be a lot. It’s going to be overwhelming.”
Bucky’s expression shifted from concern to guarded confusion. He gave a slow nod. “Lead the way.”
They walked back to the containment chamber door. Steve didn’t explain. He simply keyed the entry code and let the door hiss open. The humming blue glow and the scent of ozone spilled out.
Inside, the scene had reverted. Tony was back on the main speaker, his voice crackling with renewed frustration. “…aberrant energy spikes that shouldn’t be possible according to any model of physics, magical or otherwise, so forgive me for wanting a few more tests before we…”
The man in the chamber had his back to the door, a canvas of intricate tattoos over dense muscle. He laughed, a dry, rasping sound utterly devoid of warmth. “We’re back to this? Fine. Keep testing. Or better yet, let me out and see how much of it’s bullshit for yourself.”
“Tony, for the love of God, leave him alone for five seconds,” Steve said, his voice cutting through the argument.
Bucky, however, didn’t hear him. He was stuck, his body locking into place just inside the threshold. He knew that laugh. It was older, rougher, dragged over centuries of gravel, but its skeleton was the same. The shape of it echoed in a dusty London pub, in the cramped berth of a troop transport. His brain short-circuited. It wasn’t possible. He stared at the back of the man’s head, the line of his shoulders, the arcane script inked into his skin. He shook his head minutely, a physical rejection. It’s not him. It can’t be.
Steve moved into Dante’s line of sight. Dante, sensing a shift, tilted his head but didn’t turn. “What did you need?” Dante asked, his voice still edged with the residual tension from arguing with Stark.
Steve took a breath. “I needed you to get closure.”
Dante’s shoulders tightened. “Closure? What the hell does that mean?”
Steve didn’t answer with words. He just looked past Dante, to where Bucky stood frozen, and motioned with his chin for him to come closer.
Bucky took one step. Then another, his boots silent on the floor. Dante, reading the look on Steve’s face, finally turned around.
The world stopped.
Dante in the chamber. Bucky outside of it. Three feet and eighty years of hell separated them.
They just stared. Bucky’s face was a blank slate of pure shock, his eyes wide, drinking in the familiar sharpness of the features buried under the tattoos and the ancient pain. Dante didn’t move. He simply ceased to breathe.
Then his eyes changed. They melted from their stormy grey to a soft, luminous pink, a color of raw and helpless affection. That pink bled immediately into a deep, ocean blue, a bottomless sorrow that seemed to swallow the light in the room. Finally, they shifted to a swirling, uncertain hazel, a turmoil of confusion and disbelief. The colors churned, unstable, a visible storm of everything he couldn’t say.
Bucky broke the silence. His voice was a shattered thing, barely a whisper. “Dante?”
The sound of his name in that voice, after so long, broke whatever was holding Dante upright. He took a half-step back as if struck, the golden restraint bands flaring brightly. His lips moved, forming the word, but no sound came out. Then it did, cracked and broken.
“James.”
Bucky’s face was a fracture line of disbelief. His eyes, wide and searching, cut from Dante’s pained expression to Steve’s. It was a fraction of a second, a silent, desperate plea for verification in a reality that had split open.
Steve met his gaze and gave a single, solemn nod. Yes. It’s him.
The speaker in the ceiling crackled to life again. “Look, not to break up the heartfelt reunion of the literally-damned,” Tony’s voice came through, drier than dust, “but are we just ignoring the part where he said a kid with his genes is a pending apocalypse? We should probably vote on the ‘unleashing him’ thing. Formally.”
The words were barely out before Dante’s head snapped toward the speaker. The churning hazel of his eyes evaporated, incinerated in an instant by a surge of pure, boiling crimson. The red wasn’t just a color; it was a light source, casting hellish reflections on the reinforced glass. He didn’t speak. He just stared at the source of the voice, his entire being radiating a violence so potent the containment field buzzed in protest.
“Fucking stop for five minutes, Stark.” Steve’s command was a crack of ice, absolute and final.
The speaker went silent. No retort, no static. Just dead air.
Dante’s burning gaze held for another beat on the empty speaker before slowly, painfully, dragging back to Bucky. The crimson didn’t fade. It pulsed, a heart of fury.
Bucky opened his mouth, his lips forming a silent shape, maybe a name, maybe an apology that had no beginning.
“You left.”
Dante’s voice wasn’t loud. It was ground glass and dead embers. It shoved the two words into the space between them like a physical object.
Bucky’s breath vanished. All the air seemed to leave the room, sucked into the vacuum of those two words.
“I waited,” Dante continued, the red in his eyes swirling now, a vicious spiral bleeding into streaks of that agonized blue. The colors fought, mismatched and churning. “I don’t even fucking know how long. Days. Weeks. I just sat there in our bunk, waiting for you to come back and finish the argument. Or just… come back.”
A shimmer of moisture welled in those impossible, clashing eyes, but it didn’t fall. It just made the red and blue blaze brighter, a portrait of anger dissolving into absolute sorrow.
“I loved you.” The confession was choked, ripped from a place of old, septic wounding. It wasn’t sweet. It was an accusation. “I mention one thing. One. We argue, and you disappeared.” His voice frayed, thread by thread, until it was just raw pain given sound. “You just vanished from the face of the Earth and left me there. Alone.”
The final word hung in the humming silence, a verdict delivered after an eighty-year trial. It contained every second of his capture, every year of torture under the mercenaries, every century of breaking and reshaping in Hell. It was the foundational pain everything else had been built upon.
Bucky stood utterly still, his metal hand clenched at his side, his own eyes glistening. He looked as if he’d been physically gutted, all language, all breath, all defense stolen from him.
He looked as if he’d been physically gutted, all language, all breath, all defense stolen from him.
Dante let out a weak, dry laugh. He got closer to the glass, near where Bucky stood outside the chamber. The shimmering restraint bands stretched with his movement, casting distorted golden lines across his chest.
“I waited…” he whispered, his forehead almost touching the transparent barrier. His breath fogged the glass in a fleeting, cloudy bloom. “And you just never came back. Never said anything. Fucking nothing.”
Bucky finally moved. His metal hand came up, fingers splayed, as if to touch the ghost of that breath fog. He didn’t dare.
“I hated myself for so long because I brought that shit up to you,” Dante continued, his voice crumbling at the edges. The red in his eyes had bled away completely, leaving only that bottomless, wounded blue. “So fucking long.”
Dante paused. Steve could hear how pained he was, each word a strained exhalation. Bucky didn’t know where to even begin. His mouth opened, closed. A choked sound escaped, not a word.
Dante closed his eyes for a minute. The tattoos on his eyelids looked like ancient sutures. He let out a deep, shaky breath that shuddered through his entire frame.
He looked back at Bucky, who was still frozen in place.
“Did you actually love me?” Dante asked. The question was small, stripped bare. It held no sarcasm, no rage. Just a need for an answer that was eighty years overdue. “Did you?”
The silence that followed was a living thing. The hum of the tech, the distant, silent observation from Tony’s booth, Steve’s own heartbeat—it all faded into white noise.
Bucky’s face fractured. The shock dissolved into something more acute, more horrified. “Yes.” It was a rasp, torn from a place of pure truth. “God, Dante. Yes. Of course I did.”
He finally stepped forward, his boot scuffing against the floor. His real hand came up to mirror Dante’s, palm against the glass, inches apart. “I loved you so much it scared the hell out of me. That’s what the argument was about. That’s why I left. I was a coward. I got the order for the solo drop and I just… ran. Because talking to you about it, about any of it, felt more dangerous than the mission.”
Dante’s eyes searched Bucky’s, the blue churning with a fresh, confusing pain. “You ran,” he echoed, not as an accusation now, but as a man trying to solve an impossible equation.
“I got on the plane,” Bucky said, the words coming faster now, a dam breaking. “I got on the plane, and I was gonna come back. I was gonna figure it out. I had this stupid speech half-written in my head.” His metal fist clenched. “Then HYDRA happened. The fall. The ice. The… the decades after. Steve, he told you, right? What they did to me?”
Steve spoke from the shadows near the door, his voice gravel. “He knows.”
Bucky’s eyes never left Dante’s. “They took everything. My arm. My memories. My name. They wiped me clean, over and over. But you…” He shook his head, a desperate, confused gesture. “You were a ghost. A feeling. A hole where something warm was supposed to be. I didn’t have a name for it. I didn’t have a face. Just this… ache. For years. And I never knew why.”
Dante stared. The revelation didn’t bring peace. It spliced the old, familiar betrayal with something vast and horrifying and entirely new. His hatred had had a target: James Buchanan Barnes, who chose to walk away. This… this had no target. Just a machine, a weapon, created from the man he loved, scrubbed blank.
“They took you from me twice,” Dante said, the words hollow with understanding. “First you left. Then they erased you from yourself.” A tremor ran through his arms. “There’s no one to even blame.”
“Blame me,” Bucky whispered, pressing his palm harder against the cool surface. “Please. It’s easier. Blame the coward who walked out. Because the thing they made after? That wasn’t me. And I have to live with what it did, but I can’t apologize for it. It’s like apologizing for a knife.”
Dante’s gaze dropped to Bucky’s metal hand, then back to his eyes. The chaos in his own eyes slowly stilled, settling into a weary, grey acceptance. The fight seemed to drain out of him, leaving a profound exhaustion in its wake.
“I missed you,” Dante said, so quiet it was almost inaudible. “Every day. In hell. It was the worst part. Remembering what your laugh sounded like.”
Bucky’s composure broke. A single, sharp sob escaped him, and he leaned his own forehead against the glass, mirroring Dante. “I’m here now. I’m me now.”
“I can see that,” Dante murmured. He looked past Bucky’s shoulder to Steve. “You got him back.”
Steve nodded, his own throat tight. “Took a while.”
A long, strained moment passed, just the sound of their breathing, out of sync. Then Dante’s eyes changed again, not in color, but in focus. The grief retracted, coiled back into the deeper, more urgent wound.
“Lucien,” Dante said, the name cracking the fragile moment like a stone through ice.
Bucky blinked, pulling back slightly. The name. His son. The reality of it, of everything Dante had endured, came crashing back in.
“They have him because of me,” Dante said, his voice regaining a sliver of its earlier steel. “Because I loved you. That was the weakness he used. My father. He saw it, and he exploited it.” He finally stepped back from the glass, the restraint bands pulling taut. “The waiting’s done. The blaming’s done. I need to find my son.”
He looked directly at Steve, then at the one-way mirror where he knew Tony was watching. “You wanna talk terms? Safeguards? Let’s talk. Now. I’ll wear a tracking chip. I’ll take a chaperone. I’ll swear on whatever power you think can hold me. But we start today.”
He turned his gaze back to Bucky, and for the first time, something like the ghost of their old connection flickered there—not a smile, but a shared, grim purpose. “You owe me a conversation. A real one.”