Chapter 3: Hell's Deadline
Bucky held Dante’s gaze through the glass, the weight of decades and devastation hanging between them. “Yes,” Bucky said, his voice low but steady. “We do owe each other that.”
Dante gave a single, sharp nod. The fight seemed to leave his body all at once, replaced by a weary practicality. He turned and walked back to the simple steel chair in the center of the containment chamber. The hum of the restraint bands softened as he sat, the golden light dimming to a faint corona around his wrists and ankles. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and ran a hand through his unkempt hair. For a moment, he just looked like a tired man in a holding cell.
The heavy door to the observation room hissed open. Tony Stark walked in, a tablet in one hand, his other shoved in his pocket. He stopped just inside the threshold, eyeing Dante through the layers of reinforced glass and energy fields. “So. A heartwarming reunion. Cue the violins.” He tapped his tablet. “Doesn’t change the data. Or the fact that we’re basically considering unleashing a tactical demonic nuke based on a hunch.”
Dante didn’t look up. He just chuckled, a dry, humorless sound that echoed slightly in the sterile chamber. When he lifted his head, his eyes were burning a hot, golden amber.
“You know,” Tony continued, scrolling, “my systems still can’t pin down your exact metaphysical composition. It’s like you’re a walking violation of causality. Fun for the folks at CERN, nightmare for me.”
“Stark,” Steve warned, his voice a low rumble.
“What? It’s a valid point. We need parameters. Rules of engagement. A safeword.”
One second, Dante was in the chair.
The next, there was a sound like tearing silk and shattering crystal. The containment field didn’t break—it simply wasn’t where he was anymore. A smear of shadow and amber light crossed the twenty-foot space between the chamber and the observation window.
And then he was just there, inside the observation room, standing a foot from Tony.
The man was gone. In his place stood something pulled from a stained-glass window in a burning cathedral. Curving obsidian horns, sharp as surgical steel, swept back from his temples. Great wings of black leather, veined with amber light, were half-unfurled, their tips brushing the ceiling tiles and displacing holographic displays. A spiked tail, whip-like and restless, lashed slowly behind him. The air smelled of ozone, clove, and cold stone.
Tony froze, his tablet slipping from his fingers to clatter on the floor. He hadn’t seen him move. There was no blur, no speed. It was a negation of intermediate space.
Dante leaned in, the warmth of his presence hitting Tony’s face like the dry heat from an open furnace door. His golden eyes held no pupil, just molten, swirling fire. “Stop,” Dante said, his voice layered with a deeper, resonant echo that vibrated in the chest. “Fucking. Trying me, Stark.”
Tony’s breath hitched. His brain, always racing ten steps ahead, skidded to a halt. Every calculation, every contingency plan, evaporated in the face of this immediate, majestic impossibility. He took one involuntary step back, his shoulder blades hitting the cool observation window.
Dante didn’t follow. He just let the reality of his presence sink in—the sheer, terrifying scale of what he usually kept caged inside his human skin. A demonstration. Not an attack. He held Tony’s wide-eyed stare for three long heartbeats.
Then the horns, wings, and tail dissolved. Not with a flash, but like smoke unraveling in a reverse wind, pulled back into the tattoos on his skin which now glowed faintly before fading. He was just a man again, in borrowed S.H.I.E.L.D. sweats, looking pale and slightly drained.
He turned his back on a speechless Tony, walked to the steel table in the middle of the room, and sat down in a vacant chair. He took a deep, shuddering breath, leaning his head back against the wall.
When he spoke, his voice was different. It was flat, stripped of all sarcasm and pain, layered with an ironclad authority that made Steve straighten up and Bucky’s eyes sharpen in recognition. It was the voice of Captain Marcus, their old, hard-as-nails drill sergeant from basic. It was the voice of the stubborn, brilliant kid from the 107th who’d look a superior officer dead in the eye and explain, in meticulous detail, why his order was stupid and would get them all killed.
“Listen up,” Dante said, not raising his voice. It carried anyway, final and clear. “I’m telling you how this is going down. It’s not up for negotiation.”
Steve and Bucky exchanged a glance. That tone. It transported them both, instantly, to a muddy field in Jersey, to a tactical briefing in a rain-drenched tent. It was a voice that expected obedience.
“I know I can get him back on my own,” Dante continued, his gaze sweeping over them, missing nothing. “So everyone stays here. This isn’t a team op. It’s an extraction. My extraction.”
“No,” Tony said, finding his voice again, though it was thinner than before. He cleared his throat. “Absolutely not. That’s a non-starter. You don’t go solo into a hostile, unknown supernatural stronghold. That’s Avengers 101.”
Dante’s eyes flashed a warning red, brief and hot like a coal popping in a fire. Not a threat of violence, but a promise of consequences. “Yes. If any of you go, you’ll die.” He said it with the cold certainty of a coroner. “I’m built to take what they’ll throw my way. None of you are. Bullets and repulsors mean nothing where he’s being held. The physics are… playful there. I’m going to get hurt. That’s inevitable. Part of the plan.”
He placed his palms flat on the table. “I’m going to bring Lucien back here. Only if he’s a threat—and I mean an active, immediate danger—that’s when you put him in that chamber.” He drilled the word ‘only’ into the space between them, making sure it stuck. Then he shifted his focus, locking onto Tony. “Only if he’s a threat. If I come back and he’s being tested on. In any fucking way, shape, or form. We’re going to have a fucking problem. Do you understand the distinction?”
Tony held his stare. The engineer in him warred with the man who’d just seen the abyss look back. He gave a short, tight nod. “Distinction understood.”
“Good.” Dante leaned back. “The sequence is simple. I go. I get him. I bring him here. Then I go back and finish off whatever fucking assholes are still kicking in that fucking place they’ve got him in. Then I’ll be back.” He said it like he was reading from a grocery list. “That’s it. That’s the mission.”
The room was silent. Steve looked at Bucky, who gave a near-imperceptible nod. This wasn’t the broken man from the cell or the furious creature from moments ago. This was a soldier with a clear objective and the terrifying capability to see it through. Arguing was pointless. Worse, it was a dangerous delay.
“Alright,” Steve said, the word settling the matter. “We agree. What do you need?”
“Coordinates,” Dante said, his commander’s tone easing back into a weary rasp. “Or the closest thing you’ve got. And a door far away from anything you care about. It’s going to get loud when I open it.”
Tony bent down, picked up his tablet, and swiped at it. “I’ll have a quinjet ready to take you to our most remote containment facility. It’s a concrete box in the middle of a desert. You can… do your thing there.”
Dante stood up. “Then we’re done talking.” He looked at Bucky, just for a second, the red and amber completely gone, leaving just his own storm-grey eyes. “Save the conversation. I’ll want to have it when I get back.”
He walked out of the observation room, not waiting for an escort. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in the hallway pressed themselves against the walls as he passed.
Back in the observation room, Tony let out a long, controlled breath. “Well. He’s not wrong about one thing.”
Steve was watching the empty doorway. “What’s that?”
“If his kid is anything like that,” Tony said, gesturing vaguely to where Dante had stood in his full, horrifying glory, “we are, in fact, all fucked.”
Bucky didn’t say anything. He was still looking at the empty chair where Dante had sat, planning his solo war. He wasn’t thinking about the power, or the horns, or the wings. He was thinking about the stubborn, scared kid from the war, the one who’d rather get court-martialed than leave a man behind. That kid was still in there, screaming into the void for his son.
And that was somehow more terrifying than any demon.
The silence in the observation room after Dante left was a vacuum, sucking at Bucky’s ears. He stared at the empty doorway, the ghost of those storm-grey eyes imprinted on his vision. Steve’s hand landed on his shoulder, a solid, anchoring weight. “He’ll come back,” Steve said, but the words sounded hollow, even from him.
Bucky just nodded, unable to speak. His mind wasn’t in the sterile S.H.I.E.L.D. corridor. It was thrown back, violently, to a different kind of sterile: the bleached, punishing sunlight of basic training in 1941.
The memory hit him with the crisp clarity of a sniper’s scope.
They’d just gotten off the truck, a gaggle of nervous boys in ill-fitting uniforms, when he walked out. Captain Marcus. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. His presence was a physical chill, a stillness that demanded silence. His gaze, a sharp, assessing grey, scraped over them like a blade cleaning mud off a boot.
“My name is Captain Marcus,” he’d said, his voice cutting through the Jersey heat. “You will call me ‘sir’ or ‘Captain.’ You will not speak unless I ask you a direct question. Your previous lives are over. You are not sons, or brothers, or husbands here. You are potential. Most of you are shit potential.”
Bucky had felt Steve bristle beside him, but Bucky wasn’t bristling. He was transfixed. The man was all harsh lines and coiled violence, his uniform sharp enough to draw blood, his jaw set like granite. Bucky’s stomach did a slow, unfamiliar flip. He’d never looked at another man and felt his mouth go dry like this. He shoved the feeling down, deep into a locked box labeled ‘later.’
He shoved the feeling down, deep into a locked box labeled ‘later.’
That box rattled incessantly in the weeks that followed, threatening to burst open every time Captain Marcus’s cool gaze landed on him. The memory crystallized one sweltering afternoon during hand-to-hand drills. Bucky had been off all day, his mind a thousand miles away on a letter from his sister that mentioned his father’s cough.
“Barnes!” The voice cut through his distraction like a knife.
Bucky snapped to attention. Captain Marcus stood before him, his grey eyes like chips of flint. “You’re moving like you’ve got a stick up your ass. What’s your problem?”
“No problem, sir,” Bucky said, his jaw tight.
“Bullshit.” Marcus pointed to a patch of dusty ground beside the obstacle course.“Down. Give me fifty. And you’ll count them out loud so the whole platoon knows how fucking sorry they are.”
A hot wave of humiliation washed over Bucky. Steve watched, pained, but Bucky just got down, the Georgia clay gritty under his palms. “One, sir.” He pushed up, his arms already burning. “Two, sir.”
Marcus paced a slow circle around him. “You think this is a game, Barnes? You think we’re here to play soldier?” His boot came to a stop inches from Bucky’s nose. “Three, sir.”
“Twenty-eight, sir.” Bucky’s voice was ragged.
“Faster. Your form is collapsing. Are you a soldier or a sack of flour?”
“Thirty-two, sir.” Every push-up drove the grit deeper into his skin. The anger was a white-hot coal in his chest. It was directed at the captain, at the war, at himself. But underneath the rage, a treacherous, electric thread pulsed. He hated how the man’s scrutiny felt like a physical touch. He despised the way his own body responded to that voice, that demanding presence, with a mix of terror and a shameful, gut-deep hunger.
He finished the fifty, chest heaving, uniform plastered to his back with sweat. He stood, refusing to sway, and met Marcus’s eyes. They gave nothing away.
“Dismissed,” Marcus said, turning to the next recruit.
The fury simmered in Bucky all through chow, tasteless and metallic. He was scrubbing his mess tin at the pump later when a private found him. “Captain wants to see you in his office, Barnes.”
The box in his mind rattled violently.
He walked to the small, stark shack that served as the captain’s quarters, his heart a hard drum against his ribs. He knocked.
“Enter.”
Bucky stepped inside. Captain Marcus was at his desk, not looking at papers, just sitting. The afternoon light slanted through the single window, softening the harsh lines of his face. He gestured to a stool. “Sit.”
Bucky sat, stiffly, waiting for another round.
Marcus leaned back. “You’re angry.”
Bucky stayed silent. It wasn’t a question.
“Good,” Marcus said, his voice lower, devoid of its earlier public razor edge. “Use it. But you can’t let it own you. Not out there.” He paused, studying Bucky in a different way. “I called you out today because you’re one of the best I’ve got, Barnes. Your scores, your instincts. But the best are the first to get dead if they get sloppy. If they let something outside the wire get inside their head.”
The shift was so disorienting Bucky forgot to breathe. The vitriol was gone. This was assessment, stripped and honest.
“That letter you got this morning,” Marcus continued, his gaze knowing. “It’s eating you. Put it in a box. Seal it. You can open it when this is over. But you have to make it through this first. Do you understand?”
The simple acknowledgment of his fear, his distraction, punctured Bucky’s anger. The raw honesty of it, the unexpected care hidden within the brutal logic, disarmed him completely. He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Get some sleep.” Marcus looked back down at his desk, a clear dismissal.
Bucky left, the clay dust still on his hands, but the coal in his chest had been doused. In its place was a new, confusing warmth. The box labeled ‘later’ no longer felt like a prison. It felt like a promise.
It felt like a promise.
It felt like a promise, a solid, quiet thing Bucky carried through the rest of training like a stolen token. That box in his mind, the one for ‘later’, he sealed it tight. He used the focus Captain Marcus had demanded, channeling everything into becoming the soldier the man had seen in him. He aced every test, led every drill, and the captain’s grey eyes on him no longer felt like an indictment. They felt like a calibration. It was a silent, electric understanding that thrummed between them, unacknowledged but solid as stone.
Deployment in 1942 was a blur of rotten sea air and dread. Captain Marcus—Dante, Bucky had learned his first name from a requisition form and held it secretly in his mouth like a pebble—was their platoon leader. The promise of France had hardened into the reality of mud, blood, and the deafening orchestra of modern war. Dante was different there. The controlled environment of basic was gone. Here, his decisions were life or death in an instant, and a terrifying, effortless competence replaced the performative harshness. He was quieter, sharper, a live wire wrapped in smoke and shadow. He still gave Bucky shit, a sharp correction on patrol, a sarcastic remark about his shooting stance, but it was a language now. A private, constant dialogue.
Three months into the chewing meat-grinder of the Italian campaign, it happened. A tactical briefing in a shattered farmhouse went wrong. Intel had been shit. The farmhouse wasn’t abandoned; it was a nest. Flames roared to life, swallowing the back rooms where Steve was checking a map. Dante didn’t shout orders. He moved. One second he was at the window, the next he was a silhouette vanishing into an inferno that cracked stone and melted glass. Bucky’s heart stopped. He fired on the machine gun nest, the roar of his own weapon meaningless in his ears. Two minutes later, Dante emerged from the black smoke, Steve’s limp form hauled over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, the sleeve of his own uniform smoldering, his face streaked with soot and a terrible, peaceful fury. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He lowered Steve to the medics, gave a curt status update, and lit a cigarette with a steady hand. Bucky watched him, the fear cooling into a sudden, overwhelming ache. He was tougher. More capable. More fucking beautiful than anything had a right to be in this hellscape.
That night, after the adrenaline had bled away into a jittery exhaustion, Bucky found him. Dante was in a half-collapsed toolshed they used as a command post, bent over a map under the weak light of a kerosene lamp. The shadows carved him out of the dark, all harsh angles and focused intensity. “Captain?” Bucky’s voice sounded rough.
Dante didn’t look up. “What do you need, Sergeant?”
The words Bucky had rehearsed—a question about the next day’s patrol route—dissolved into ash on his tongue. He just stood there, the image of Dante walking out of that fire playing behind his eyes on a loop. The quiet was thick, charged with the day’s violence and something else, older, that had been building since Jersey. Dante finally glanced up, his grey eyes catching the lamplight. “James?”
Something in Bucky snapped. A control he hadn’t known he was clinging to just vaporized. He crossed the small space in two strides, his gear clinking, and before thought could interfere, he captured Dante’s mouth with his own. It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision, a claim, a translation of every frustrated, furious, awed feeling he’d locked away.
He expected shoveback, a fist, court-martial. For a suspended second, Dante was statue-still. Then a low, raw sound vibrated from Dante’s throat into Bucky’s mouth. Dante’s hand came up, not to push him away, but to fist tightly in the front of Bucky’s jacket, yanking him closer. He kissed back with the same ferocious, desperate hunger, his lips parting, tongue sliding against Bucky’s with an intent that made Bucky’s knees weak.
The map crinkled and tore under their weight as Dante reversed their positions, pressing Bucky back against the wooden bench. There was no discussion. No questions. Buckles were ripped open, coarse wool trousers shoved down over hips. Dante’s hand was calloused and sure, wrapping around Bucky’s hard cock, stroking him with a rough, perfect friction that ripped a choked gasp from Bucky’s throat.
“Wait,” Bucky breathed against his mouth, not wanting him to stop but needing to say it. “I’ve never… with a man.”
Dante froze, his forehead pressed to Bucky’s, his breath hot and fast. He searched Bucky’s face, his eyes pools of liquid shadow in the low light. “Do you want this?” His voice was gravel, strained. “Tell me right now. Yes or no.”
Bucky looked at him—the soot still in the lines of his face, the absolute focus turned on him now, a different kind of fire. “Yes. Fuck, yes.”
That was all Dante needed. He spat into his palm, slicking himself, his own cock thick and eager. He positioned himself, the blunt head pressing against Bucky. “Breathe out,” he commanded, his voice softer now but no less absolute. Bucky obeyed, exhaling shakily, and Dante pushed in, slow, inexorable, filling him with a burn that made Bucky’s eyes water. He was gentle, agonizingly so, until Bucky’s body relaxed around him, the pain melting into a deep, shocking fullness. “Alright?” Dante murmured, his lips against Bucky’s temple.
“Yeah.” Bucky’s voice was wrecked. He moved his hips, experimentally, and a spark of pure pleasure shot up his spine. “Don’t be gentle. Please.”
A feral grin touched Dante’s mouth. He withdrew and snapped his hips forward, harder, setting a punishing rhythm that knocked the breath from Bucky’s lungs. Each drive punched a ragged sound from Bucky’s chest—gasps, curses, pleas. The bench scraped against the dirt floor with their momentum. Bucky wrapped his legs around Dante’s waist, pulling him deeper, meeting every thrust. “Harder,” Bucky growled, nails digging into Dante’s shoulders through the rough fabric. “Fuck me harder, Captain.”
Dante’s control shattered. He fucked into Bucky with a brutal, focused intensity, his thrusts becoming faster, deeper, piston-like. The shed filled with the sound of skin slapping against skin, their ragged breaths, and Bucky’s broken moans. Dante’s mouth was everywhere—on Bucky’s neck, his jaw, claiming his mouth again in a wet, devouring kiss. “That’s it,” Dante grunted into his skin, his voice thick with lust. “Take it. You take it so fucking good.” The praise, filthy and earnest, liquefied Bucky’s spine. He came untouched, his climax ripping through him with a silent scream, his body clamping down on Dante’s cock. Dante followed with a choked curse, his hips stuttering, pumping his release deep inside Bucky with a final, shuddering thrust.
They collapsed together in a heap of limbs and damp uniforms, breathing in ragged unison. After a long moment, Dante shifted, his hand surprisingly tender as he brushed Bucky’s sweat-soaked hair from his forehead. “Okay?” he asked again, his voice rough but edged with a concern that made Bucky’s chest tighten.
“Better than okay,” Bucky managed, his body humming with a bone-deep satiation he’d never known.
A week later, a lieutenant found him mending a strap. “Captain wants to see you, Barnes.”
A familiar heat, now warmly recognized, pooled low in Bucky’s gut. He nodded, his pulse picking up.
Dante was in a captured German supply room, alone. The door clicked shut. For a moment, they just looked at each other across the space, the air crackling. “Sit,” Dante said, nodding to an ammunition crate.
Bucky sat, the obedience sparking a thrill through him. Dante approached, dropping to his knees in the dust without ceremony. He deftly opened Bucky’s trousers, freed his already-hard cock, and took him into his mouth in one smooth, deep motion. Bucky’s head thumped back against a crate with a dull thud. Dante’s mouth was wet, hot, and devastatingly skilled, his tongue working the underside, his lips tight, his hand working the base. It was filthy, sublime, and over far too quickly. Bucky came with a sharp cry, spurting down Dante’s throat. Dante swallowed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes dark with hunger.
He stood, yanked Bucky up, turned him around, and pushed him over the same crate. He was inside him again in seconds, no patience, just raw need. He fucked him with deep, relentless strokes, one arm wrapped around Bucky’s chest, holding him upright. “You come when I tell you,” Dante breathed into his ear, his voice a low, commanding rumble. “You understand? You’re mine to use.”
“Yours,” Bucky gasped, the submission a heady drug.
The pace was brutal, perfect. Dante’s hand snaked around to stroke Bucky, his touch expert. “Look at you,” Dante murmured, his lips against Bucky’s shoulder blade. “Taking my cock like you were made for it. My good fucking soldier.”
The words detonated in Bucky’s brain. He shattered again, his orgasm torn from him violently, clenching around Dante, who followed with a guttural groan, his hips jerking erratically as he spilled inside him.
From then on, it was their secret rhythm of the war. Stolen moments in ruined barns, quiet forest clearings, empty trenches. They would kiss like they were drowning, touch with a frantic, grasping need, fuck with a passion that momentarily burned away the horror around them. It was a lifeline, primal and essential.
Two months after that first time in the toolshed, they were in a cellar, the distant rumble of artillery their only witness. Bucky, still buzzing from the aftershocks, tracing the lines of Dante’s jaw, just said it. “I have feelings for you. More than just this.”
Dante went very still. He looked at Bucky, his grey eyes unguarded and terrifyingly vulnerable in the gloom. He let out a long, slow breath. “I know.” He brought Bucky’s knuckles to his lips, a startlingly gentle gesture. “I do, too.”
That was it. No grand declarations. Just a shared, silent truth in the dark. They were together. It was the most precious, dangerous secret either of them had ever kept, a fragile flame guarded between them in the midst of the consuming fire.