Chapter 5: Last Rites and First Steps
The silence in the concrete bunker was heavier than any blast door. It was the silence of a vacuum, of held breath, of a miracle that had already curdled into dread.
Bucky stood perfectly still, his arms locked around the unconscious boy. Lucien’s head lolled against his shoulder, dark hair soft against Bucky’s jaw. Steve and Tony stared, their earlier urgency frozen into disbelief.
“Jesus,” Tony whispered, the word leaving him like a punch.
He wasn’t wrong. The kid was maybe seventeen, eighteen. But he was a sketch of Dante from a younger, softer time. The same sharp jawline, the same arch to the brows, the same full mouth that even in sleep seemed poised for a sarcastic comment. He had his father’s build—lean and wiry—and even in the sterile light, faint, luminous markings, similar to Dante’s but finer, like delicate circuitry, traced the skin of his forearms where the torn sleeves of his simple tunic had ridden up. The celestial iron burns were angry red weals around his wrists.
Steve finally moved, his hand reaching out, not to take the boy, but as if to verify he was real. “He looks just like him.”
Bucky didn’t answer. He was cataloging the boy’s weight, the too-prominent ribs he could feel through the fabric, the pallor of his skin. He was here. Dante had done it. A fierce, desperate pride warred with a yawning fear. Dante was still in there. Alone.
“Med-bay,” Bucky said, his voice rough. “Now.”
They moved as a unit. Bucky carried Lucien with a care that felt instinctive, a ghost of how he might have carried a wounded private off a field a lifetime ago. Tony led the way, already barking orders at F.R.I.D.A.Y. to prep scanners and bio-beds.
They’d just laid him on the crisp white sheets when Lucien’s eyes snapped open.
They weren’t gold, or grey. They were white. Solid, pupil-less, glowing white.
He bolted upright with a gasp that was pure terror, a sound ripped from a deep, dark place. He flailed, limbs tangled in the sheet, his gaze darting around the sterile, unfamiliar room, seeing none of it.
“Whoa, hey, you’re safe—” Steve started, his Captain’s voice calm and steady, hands up in a placating gesture.
Lucien didn’t hear him. He scrambled back on the bed until his back hit the wall, his chest heaving. “Where is he? Where’s my father?” His voice was high with panic, his accent an archaic echo of Dante’s.
“He’s coming,” Bucky said, stepping closer, keeping his movements slow. He used the voice he’d once used on shell-shocked soldiers in base camps. “He got you out. He’s right behind you.”
“You don’t understand!” Lucien cried, his white eyes staring through Bucky, seeing something else entirely. A trickle of blood seeped from his nose. “He’s hurt. He’s trying… he can’t pull the threads. There’s a hole in him. It’s burning him out.” His small hands clutched at his own abdomen, mirroring a wound they couldn’t see.
Tony and Steve shared a alarmed look. “Kid, you’re in shock,” Tony said, trying for a lighter tone. “Just breathe. Let the fancy scanners do their thing. Your old man is tougher than he looks.”
The attempt fell flat. Lucien shook his head violently, tears cutting clean trails through the grime on his cheeks. “You have to go back. Now! Please!”
His pleading shifted into a low, frantic chant under his breath, words in a language that slithered and crackled. The air in the med-bay grew thick, static raising the hair on Bucky’s arms. The monitors by the bed flickered, screens filling with fractal snow.
“Lucien,” Bucky said, more firmly, taking another step. “Look at me. You need to stop.”
The boy’s head jerked toward the sound of his name. For a second, the blinding white of his eyes flickered, clouded with confusion and sheer exhaustion. Then they ignited.
The white melted, consumed from within by a surge of molten, brilliant amber. A surge of raw, undirected power.
He wasn’t trying to open a rift. It was a scream given dimensional form.
The air six feet from the med-bay bed tore open with a sound like a universe vomiting. It wasn’t a clean, amber spiral like Dante’s. This was a jagged, unstable wound of light and shadow, hemorrhaging chaotic energy. Through the screaming tear, they saw it: a cracked obsidian plain under a bruise-colored sky. And in the foreground, crumpled on the ground like a discarded coat.
Dante.
He was on his side, one black wing twisted underneath him at a sickening angle. The tactical gear was shredded, and across his chest, from collarbone to opposite hip, was a furrow of ruined flesh. It wasn’t bleeding conventionally; it wept a slow, phosphorescent gold, like the light was leaking out of him. His face was ash-grey, his lips parted. He wasn’t moving.
Bucky was already moving before his mind fully processed the image.
“Barnes, wait!” Steve yelled.
He didn’t wait. He didn’t think. The promise was a drumbeat in his skull. You fucking come back. Whole. He crossed the room in three strides and dove through the unstable rift.
The other side was an assault. The air was thin and toxic, scraping his lungs. The gravity felt wrong, tugging at his bones. He dropped to his knees beside Dante, the obsidian scorching hot even through his pants. He didn’t check for a pulse. He slid his arms under Dante’s shoulders and knees—the body was terrifyingly limp—and heaved him up with a grunt born of pure super-soldier adrenaline. He turned and lunged back toward the shimmering, screaming tear in reality.
He stumbled through, crashing to his knees on the cool lab floor, Dante’s dead weight in his arms.
The rift snapped shut behind him, severing the connection with a final, concussive pop.
“F.R.I.D.A.Y., vitals!” Tony barked, rushing forward.
Bucky laid Dante down on the floor, his hands already moving to his neck, his fingers pressing against the cold skin. Nothing. He tilted Dante’s head back, sealed his mouth over his, and forced a breath into lungs that didn’t rise. He leaned back, interlaced his hands, and began compressions on the ruined chest. The feel of the grievous wound under his palms, the give of broken ribs, was horrifying.
“No pulse. No respiratory activity,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. confirmed, her tone clinical.
“Come on, you bastard,” Bucky snarled, pressing down. One. Two. Three. Four. “You don’t get to do this.” Five. Six. “Not after all that.” Seven. Eight.
Steve was there, ready to take over compressions, his face a mask of grim determination.
But Lucien was faster. He slid off the bed, falling to the floor beside his father. He shoved Bucky’s hands away, not with strength, but with a frantic, desperate need.
“Dad? Dad, please.” He patted Dante’s cheek, his small hands leaving smudges. “Wake up. You have to wake up.” His voice broke. He grabbed Dante’s shoulders, gave him a shake. The body was a rag doll. “Please. I’m here. I’m safe. Look.”
Nothing. Not a flicker. The golden light from the chest wound was dimming, fading to a dull, ominous grey.
The golden light from the chest wound was dimming, fading to a dull, ominous grey. Lucien’s breath hitched, a raw, animal sound of grief ripping from his throat. He pulled his hand back, made a fist, and slammed it into the lab floor next to his father’s head.
The concrete didn’t just crack. It bloomed.
A web of fine fractures shot out from the point of impact, glowing with the same molten amber that had filled his eyes. The light didn’t travel along the cracks. It pulsed downward, then reversed course, surging back up and into Dante’s still form with a sound like a high-tension cable snapping.
Dante’s body arched off the floor, every muscle seizing. The grey, dead wound on his chest flared anew—not with holy light, but with a deep, hungry black fire threaded through with gold. It lasted three seconds. Then he collapsed, utterly inert.
Silence.
For three full minutes, nothing happened. The only sound was Lucien’s ragged weeping and the faint hum of the lab’s climate control. Tony had frozen, a diagnostic scanner in his hand, forgotten. Steve knelt, hands hovering, useless. Bucky watched the unmoving chest, his own breath held, the memory of compressions still buzzing in his palms.
Lucien slowly uncurled his fist. His knuckles were scraped raw, smeared with his blood and concrete dust. He stared at them, then at his father’s unchanged, pale face. His eyes, wide and terrified, flicked to Bucky.
“What did I just do?” he whispered. The words were tiny, shattered things. He looked scared, exhausted, and utterly panicked, his body trembling from a drain no scanner could measure.
Bucky moved. He shifted closer on his knees and put his flesh hand on Lucien’s bony shoulder. The kid flinched, but didn’t pull away. “Hey,” Bucky said, his voice low, trying to sand the rough edge off his own fear. “Just breathe. It’s—”
Lucien’s eyes rolled back, the vivid green swallowed by a flat, pupil-less white.
He went rigid. A choked gasp escaped him. He was seeing something, but not in the room. His head tilted, as if following a swift, dizzying reel of film only he could see. Bucky’s hand on his shoulder was the only anchor.
He was seeing the cellar in Le Havre, the smell of damp wool and fear. He saw Dante—younger, softer around the edges, hair cropped close—pressing a bandage to a gash on Bucky’s arm, his soldier’s efficiency betrayed by the gentle fretfulness in his storm-grey eyes. He felt the quiet, desperate ache in Bucky’s chest as he watched Dante sleep, fitful in a foxhole. He saw the press of lips in a dusty toolshed, a secret so immense it felt like it would crack the world in two. The way Dante looked at him. The way Dante took care of him. The way Dante loved him. All of it. A hundred years of memories, felt through the filter of Bucky’s own longing, grief, and steadfast devotion, flooded into Lucien in a dizzying, nonsensical cascade.
The whiteness bled away. His eyes snapped back to their natural, clear green, like sun through spring leaves. They focused on Bucky’s face, seeing it anew. The centuries of pain, the loyalty, the love. The recognition was instantaneous and profound.
“You’re Bucky?” he asked, the panic replaced by stunned awe.
Bucky’s blood went cold. Shock locked his jaw. How could he possibly—?
Dante bolted upright.
He didn’t wake slowly. He ignited. One second he was a corpse on the floor, the next he was sitting, back rod-straight, a ragged, sawing gasp tearing into his lungs as he dragged in a breath like his first. His eyes were wild, pure demon-gold, scanning the room with feral disorientation. They landed on Lucien. Then on Bucky, his hand on Lucien’s shoulder.
The gold flickered, dimming to a turbulent, exhausted grey. He blinked, swayed, and brought a hand up to his chest. His fingers probed the ruin of his shirt, the scorched skin beneath. The horrific wound was now a thick, ropy scar, shiny and new, pulsing faintly with an internal amber light before fading to a dull pink.
“What,” Dante croaked, his voice shredded, “the hell was in that punch?”
Lucien’s eyes were wide, luminous pools of relieved green. Before Dante could register anything else—the lab, the stunned faces, the phantom ache in his chest—Lucien was wrapped around him in a hug.
It wasn’t a gentle embrace. It was a full-bodied, desperate clutch, thin arms locking around Dante’s neck, face buried against his shoulder. A shudder ran through the boy, silent sobs wracking his frame. Dante froze for a half-second, his hands hovering in the air. Then he exhaled, a long, broken sound, and hugged him back. He folded himself around his son, one hand cradling the back of Lucien’s head, his own eyes squeezing shut.
The last vestiges of pain dissolved. The stiffness, the residual burn, the hollow feeling of depleted grace—it all flushed away, replaced by a warm, humming wholeness. He was fully himself again. His grace, restored and calm, settled under his skin. The wounds were healed, the new scar on his chest just a memory of texture. He opened his eyes, their color shifting to a calm, clear grey. He looked between the three startled men over Lucien’s shoulder.
Tony recovered first. “Welcome back to the land of the obnoxiously hard to kill.” He lowered the scanner he’d been holding like a weapon. “Kid’s got one hell of a right hook. Literally.”
Dante didn’t answer. He gently pried Lucien back, just enough to see his face. He cupped the boy’s jaw, his thumb brushing away a streak of dirt and tears. His gaze dropped to Lucien’s wrists, to the angry, blistered burns left by the celestial iron. “Let’s fix that, okay?”
Lucien just nodded, mute.
Dante took one of Lucien’s hands in both of his. He didn’t chant. He simply focused, and a soft, gold-tinged warmth emanated from his palms. It washed over Lucien’s skin, and the brutal burns faded, the redness receding, the blistered flesh smoothing into unmarked skin. He repeated the process with the other wrist. The tension drained from Lucien’s shoulders, a small, shaky sigh escaping him.
“Sleepy?” Dante asked, his voice still rough but softer now.
Lucien nodded again, his eyelids already drooping. The colossal expenditure of power, the terror, the relief—it had all crashed down on him. He was running on vapor.
“Right.” Dante moved, shifting to get his feet under him. He stood, pulling Lucien up with him, the boy leaning heavily into his side. “Point me to a horizontal surface that isn’t a dimensional rift or a prison floor.”
Steve gestured to the med-bay bed. “Here’s good.”
They got him to the bed. Lucien was practically sleepwalking. He slumped onto the mattress, his head hitting the pillow, and was asleep between one breath and the next. Dante stood there for a moment, just watching the even rise and fall of his son’s chest, his hand resting on the blanket near Lucien’s shoulder. The others gave him that moment, a silent bubble in the sterile room.
Finally, Dante turned. He looked at Steve, then Tony, then Bucky. His gaze lingered on Bucky the longest, a silent, heavy communication passing between them. He jerked his head toward the door. “We need a room. And five minutes.”
Bucky nodded once. “There’s a monitoring office. Soundproof.”
Without another word, Dante walked out of the med-bay. Bucky followed. The hydraulic door hissed shut behind them, leaving Steve and Tony in the quiet with the sleeping boy.
The office was small, all brushed steel and darkened holographic screens reflecting the low, ambient light. Dante walked to the far wall, placed his hands flat against the cool metal, and just stood there, head bowed. Bucky closed the door. The lock engaged with a soft, definitive click.
The sound seemed to release something. Dante’s shoulders slumped. He let out a breath that trembled at the edges.
He let out a breath that trembled at the edges. He finally turned around, leaning back against the wall. The overhead light cut hollows under his cheekbones, and the new scar on his chest was a stark, pink line against his skin. The grey in his eyes held a depth of weariness Bucky had only seen in his own reflection.
“I’m here,” Dante said, his voice quiet. “In one expensive, patched-together piece.”
Bucky stood by the door, his metal hand flexing at his side. “Lucien pulled you back. Did something.”
“I felt it.” Dante looked down at his hands, turning them over as if reading a story in the palms. “It wasn’t just healing. He… plugged me back into the mains. I haven’t felt this complete since before the war. Since before…” He trailed off, the unspoken words hanging between them: Since before you left.
The silence that followed was a live wire. It wasn’t the quiet of the bunker or the borderlands. This was the old, familiar quiet from a porch in Brooklyn, thick with everything they’d shattered.
Dante looked at Bucky. Really looked. The perpetual brood was gone, replaced by something raw and unguarded. The grey in his eyes seemed to clear, revealing a sadness so profound it was bottomless.
“Let’s hear it, Barnes,” Dante said, the words barely more than a whisper.
Bucky’s throat worked. He’d rehearsed this in a thousand nightmares, drafted apologies on the insides of eyelids during sleepless decades. Now, standing three feet from the reason for all of it, his mind went blank and white.
“I’m sorry,” he started, the words rusty. “For leaving. That night on your porch.”
Dante didn’t move. Didn’t blink.
“You asked me to move in,” Bucky continued, the floodgates cracking. “And I just… locked up. I got scared. Not of you. Never of you. Of what it meant. To choose that. To have it.” He took a step forward, his voice gaining a desperate, ragged momentum. “I’m sorry for making you feel like it was a mistake. Like you were something to run from. I’m sorry I was a coward and walked out that door.”
He was trembling now, a fine shake in his shoulders. He’d faced down armies and monsters, but this was the excavation of his own heart, and it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever done.
“I loved you so much it felt like a medical condition,” Bucky said, a broken laugh escaping him. “I’ve had a thing for you since you yelled at Steve and me for sloppy footwork on our first day of basic. You were this arrogant, terrifyingly competent bastard, and I thought, ‘Christ, he’s beautiful.’ I never stopped. Not in the war, not after the train, not in any of the hells that came after. I carried it with me. It was the only clean thing I had left.”
He swallowed hard, meeting Dante’s gaze. Dante’s face was still, a mask. He could see the years in the new lines around his eyes, the weight of a century of solitude.
“I know I can’t fix it,” Bucky finished, his voice thinning to a thread. “I know it’s seventy years too late. But I am. I’m so goddamn sorry, Dante.”
Dante just studied him. The silence stretched, a physical tension in the small room. Bucky felt his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic bird. He’d said it. It was out. He braced for the dismissal, the cold acknowledgment, the justified anger.
Then Dante pushed off the wall. He crossed the space between them in two quiet steps. He stopped, close enough for Bucky to see the flecks of silver in the grey of his irises, the faint arcane symbols like faded tattoos along his hairline. He smelled of ozone, blood, and the same dark, warm spice Bucky remembered from their last kiss in a war.
Slowly, Dante raised his hands. He framed Bucky’s face, his thumbs brushing the high planes of his cheeks. His touch was surprisingly gentle, calloused palms cool against Bucky’s skin.
“Thank you,” Dante said.Two words. Simple.Final. They shattered Bucky completely.
A choked sound escaped him. The careful control he’d maintained for decades ruptured. His eyes stung, then overflowed. Hot tears tracked through the grime on his face, cutting clean lines. He didn’t sob. He just stood there, crying silently, his shoulders shaking as Dante held his face.
Dante pulled him in. He wrapped his arms around Bucky, one hand cradling the back of his head, fingers threading through the short, practical cut of his hair. He held him tight, his chin resting on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky buried his face in the crook of Dante’s neck, his own arms coming up to clutch at his back, fingers curling into the ruined fabric of his shirt. He could feel the ridge of the new scar through the material.
Dante’s hand moved in slow, steady circles through his hair, a grounding, repetitive motion. Bucky cried for the lost time, for the fear, for the boy he’d been and the man he’d become, for the sheer, impossible relief of being seen and forgiven.
After a long while, the storm passed. Bucky’s breathing evened out, hitching only slightly. He pulled back just enough to look up. His eyes were red-rimmed, raw.
Dante looked down at him. He searched Bucky’s face, taking in the evidence of his pain, his age, his steadfastness. Then he leaned in and kissed him.
It wasn’t like the kiss in the prep room. That had been a brand, a promise carved from desperation. This was soft. A slow, gentle press of lips, a careful rediscovery. It tasted of salt and forgiveness and a home Bucky had stopped believing in.
Dante pulled back, just an inch. His breath ghosted over Bucky’s lips. He looked him right in his eyes, his own gaze clear and certain.
“I never stopped loving you.”