Chapter 6: Devil's Claim
“I never stopped loving you.”
The words hung there, simple, absolute. A fact of the universe. Bucky could only stare, his heart a frantic, wounded thing beating against Dante’s chest. The decades of silence shattered, leaving only this truth vibrating between them in the cold, humming air of the monitoring office.
“I know,” Bucky breathed, the admission soft as a prayer. “Deep down, I always knew. It was the only thing that kept me… me.”
Dante’s eyes, a clear and steady grey now, searched his. “Seventy years is a long time to hold a grudge. Or a hope.”
“It’s a long time to be a fucking idiot,” Bucky rasped, a wet, broken laugh escaping him.
A ghost of a smile touched Dante’s mouth. “Yeah, it is.”
Then he kissed him again.
This one wasn’t gentle. It was a fuse lit. It was the dam breaking. It was seventy years of pent-up longing igniting in a sudden, hungry clash of lips and teeth. Dante’s hands slid from Bucky’s face into his hair, fisting in the short strands, tilting his head back to take the kiss deeper.
Bucky groaned into his mouth, a raw, grateful sound. His own hands, flesh and metal, scrambled at Dante’s back, pulling him closer, needing to feel the solid, living weight of him. Dante tasted like blood and ozone and the sweet, dark spice of his magic, a flavor Bucky had conjured in a thousand lonely dreams. It was real. It was here.
Dante shoved him. It wasn’t rough, but it was firm, insistent. Bucky stumbled back two steps until his spine hit the smooth, cool surface of a secondary console bank. The edge bit into the small of his back. Dante followed, crowding into his space, their bodies flush. Bucky could feel the hard line of Dante’s cock, already straining against the ruined tactical pants, pressing against his own hip.
“Tell me you want this,” Dante growled against his mouth, his breath hot. His hips rolled, a slow, filthy grind that dragged a ragged moan from Bucky’s throat. “Tell me you want me to fuck you right here, right now.”
“Christ, yes,” Bucky gasped, arching into the pressure. His hands found Dante’s ass, pulling him harder, tighter. “I want it. I want you. Dante, please—”
Dante silenced him with another brutal kiss. He yanked at the fastenings of Bucky’s combat pants, his movements efficient and desperate. The fabric gave way. Bucky shoved them down over his hips, kicking free, his own cock springing free, already wet at the tip. Dante’s hand wrapped around him, a rough, perfect stroke that made Bucky’s head thud back against the console.
“Fuck, you’re so hard for me,” Dante muttered, his voice thick with lust. He spit into his palm, the sound obscenely loud in the small room, and slicked himself roughly before pressing his cock against Bucky’s entrance. “Still tight. Always so fucking tight for me.”
Bucky was trembling, vibrating with need. He hooked one leg around Dante’s waist, opening himself, his own fingers digging into the hard muscle of Dante’s shoulders. “Do it. Don’t wait. Just fucking take me.”
Dante pushed in.
It was a burn, a stretch, a glorious, shocking fullness that punched the air from Bucky’s lungs. Dante didn’t go slow. He sheathed himself in one relentless thrust, burying himself to the hilt, his hips slamming against Bucky’s ass with a wet, solid smack.
“Jesus fuck,” Bucky choked out, his eyes squeezing shut. The sensation was overwhelming—the physical penetration, the emotional reunion, the sheer relief of it. He was being claimed, reclaimed, in the most primitive way possible. It was perfect.
Dante stilled, buried deep, his forehead dropping to Bucky’s shoulder. His whole body was taut, trembling with the effort of holding back. “You feel… god, Bucky, you feel like you were made for me.”
“I was,” Bucky breathed, turning his head to capture Dante’s lips again. “I am. Now move. Please, move.”
Dante moved.
He set a punishing, rhythmic pace, each thrust a deep, deliberate reconnection. The console rattled softly with their impact. Bucky met every one, rising onto his toes to drive Dante deeper inside him, his own cock trapped between their sweat-slicked stomachs, leaking pre-come with every jolt.
The air filled with the sounds of their coupling: the slick slap of skin, their ragged, open-mouthed breaths, the low, guttural groans they couldn’t suppress. Dante’s hands were everywhere—clutching his hip, tangled in his hair, gripping the edge of the console beside Bucky’s head.
“Look at me,” Dante commanded, his voice a dark, ragged thing.
Bucky forced his eyes open. Dante’s gaze was locked on his, the grey now burning with flecks of molten gold, the demon in him roused by the raw physicality. Sweat beaded on his brow, traced the line of his sharp jaw. He was breathtaking.
Dante leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of Bucky’s ear. The next words were a low, possessive rumble that went straight to Bucky’s core. “You still like being my good little soldier?”
A full-body shiver wracked Bucky. The old endearment, from a lifetime ago, spoken in the middle of this visceral fuck, undid him completely. It wasn’t about submission; it was about belonging. A broken, blissful sound tore from him.
“Yeah,” he moaned, the word barely audible. “God, yeah. Yours. Always yours.”
That admission unleashed something in Dante. His rhythm stuttered, turned frantic, almost brutal. He drove into Bucky with a desperate, final intensity, his fingers biting into Bucky’s flesh. “Gonna come inside you,” he gritted out, his control fraying. “Gonna fill you up. Mark you mine all over again.”
The filthy promise, the sheer possession in his tone, sent Bucky spiraling. His orgasm ripped through him without warning, a white-hot detonation that clenched around Dante’s cock. He came with a choked cry, stripes of white spilling hot between their bodies, his vision whiting out at the edges.
The convulsive tightening of Bucky’s body was the last trigger. Dante thrust once, twice more, grinding deep, and then he was coming too. Bucky felt the hot, pulsing rush of it inside him, a claiming as intimate as any vow. Dante’s cry was raw, wordless, his body bowing over Bucky’s as he shuddered through the release.
For a long moment, they stayed like that, locked together, panting against each other in the cool, electronic-scented air. The only sounds were their slowing breaths and the hum of the machinery. Slowly, Dante softened inside him and eased back, his hands coming up to steady Bucky, who was boneless against the console.
Dante rested his forehead against Bucky’s, their noses brushing. His eyes were closed, long lashes dark against his skin. “Okay?” he whispered.
Bucky managed a nod, his limbs liquid. “More than okay.”
He reached up, his metal fingers tracing the new, pink scar on Dante’s chest. It was smooth, warm. A testament. Dante covered his hand with his own, lacing their fingers together over the mark.
A sharp, high-pitched alarm suddenly blared from the main med-bay console, shattering the post-coital quiet. Red lights strobed across the darkened screens.
Both of them tensed, snapped back to the present. The alarm was a biological spike, keyed to Lucien’s monitors.
“Shit,” Dante breathed, already pulling away, grabbing for his pants.
Bucky was moving just as fast, his soldier’s reflexes overriding the lingering haze of pleasure. They dressed in frantic, silent seconds, the urgency slamming back into place.
As Dante yanked his shredded shirt over his head, his eyes met Bucky’s. In them was no regret, no awkwardness. Only a hardened, focused resolve, and beneath it, a flicker of the connection they’d just reforged. It was a foundation, solid and undeniable.
Then he turned and yanked the door open, rushing back toward the sound of the alarm and his son. Bucky was half a step behind, his body still humming, his mind already in the next fight. The reunion was over. The consequences were now.
The consequences were now.
They burst back into the med-bay, the sterile light harsh after the dim office. Steve stood rigid before the observation window, his knuckles white on the comm panel. Tony was already at a secondary terminal, fingers flying. “Vitals are spiking off the charts, but it’s not physical. It’s a neurological cascade. Panic.”
Behind the glass, in the isolation chamber, Lucien was unraveling.
He was on his feet, backed into a corner where two walls met. His breaths came in sharp, audible hitches even through the soundproofing. His eyes, wide and unseeing, scanned the empty air. He was talking, fast and low, but the words were lost to the barrier.
“Lucien, can you hear me?” Steve’s voice was calm, projecting through the speaker, but it had no purchase. “You’re in the Avengers Tower. You’re safe. The door is unlocked. You can just walk out.”
Lucien flinched as if struck. His hands came up, pressing against the sides of his head. “No, no, no,” they could see him mouthing. “Not again. This is new. This is a new one.”
“He’s not hearing me,” Steve said, a thread of helpless frustration in his tone.
Tony glanced up. “The chamber’s designed for decontamination and high-level bioscreening. It probably feels like a cell. Looks like one.”
Lucien’s murmuring grew more frantic. His gaze fixed on a point on the far wall, his pupils dilating. “Grandfather? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… please. The binding, I can feel it. It’s cold.”
He was no longer in New York. He was back in the obsidian keep, surrounded by whispering, jeering shapes only he could perceive. The sterile walls were a trick, a fresh layer of hell designed to break him. The door, a test. He slid down the wall, drawing his knees to his chest, making himself small. A low, terrified whine escaped him.
“Open it,” Dante said. His voice was flat, a sheet of ice over a volcanic core.
“Protocol says we need to—” Tony began.
“Open the goddamn door, Stark.”
The hydraulic seal released with a hiss. Dante was through the opening before it had fully retracted.
He crossed the room in five swift strides and sank to his knees on the cool floor, right in front of his son. He didn’t reach out to touch him, not yet. “Lucien.”
The boy jerked, his white-knuckled grip on his own arms tightening. He didn’t look up.
“Lucien,” Dante repeated, his voice dropping, softening into something private and unwavering. “Look at me. Right now.”
The command, so familiar, so rooted in years of training and protection, cut through the static. Lucien’s head lifted slowly. His green eyes were glassy, flooded with a terror that was decades deep.
“You’re here,” Lucien whispered, disbelieving.
“I’m here. You’re in my friend’s building. In Manhattan. You’re on a planet called Earth.” Dante kept his sentences clear, factual anchors. “This room is a medical scanner. They were just watching your sleep cycles to make sure you were okay. That’s all.”
“It’s a box,” Lucien choked out, his gaze darting to the walls. “It smells like clean things. Wrong things.”
“I know. It’s disorienting. It’s just tech. Very boring, very human tech.” Dante slowly reached out, offering his hand, palm up, between them. A bridge. “There’s no binding here. No grandfather. No demons but me. And I’m having a remarkably okay day.”
Lucien stared at the offered hand, then at Dante’s face, searching for the lie. He found none. The rigid terror in his shoulders began to melt, replaced by a wave of trembling exhaustion. A single tear broke free and tracked down his cheek. He unfolded one hand from his arm and placed it shakily in Dante’s.
The contact seemed to ground him. The frantic sawing of his breath began to slow, matching the steady rhythm Dante was modeling for him. The green in his eyes cleared, focusing on the present, on the scar on his father’s chest, on the real world.
“You’re sure?” Lucien asked, his voice small.
“I’m sure. Come on.” Dante stood, gently pulling Lucien up with him. He kept hold of his hand, leading him out of the chamber, past the threshold that had felt like an impossibility moments before.
Steve visibly relaxed, stepping back to give them space. Tony quirked an eyebrow, a silent acknowledgement of Dante’s efficacy.
Lucien blinked in the brighter light of the main med-bay, his free hand coming up to shield his eyes. He looked young, impossibly young, and fragile in a way that had nothing to do with physical strength.
“You’re okay,” Dante said, not a question, but a reaffirmation. He squeezed his son’s hand once before letting go. “You want something? Water?”
“They have… chocolate milk here?” Lucien asked, the question so unexpectedly normal it hung in the air for a beat.
A genuine, quiet laugh escaped Bucky from where he leaned against the doorway. It was the laugh of a man seeing a ghost step into the sunlight. “Yeah, kid. We’ve got chocolate milk.”
Dante’s gaze met Bucky’s over Lucien’s head. The moment stretched, charged with everything that had just happened in the other room—the violence of their reunion, the tenderness, the promise. It was all still there, a live current between them, but now it was filtered through this new, shared priority: the trembling boy between them.
Lucien followed his father’s glance, his eyes shifting from Dante to Bucky and back. The raw, overwhelming glimpse he’d stolen during his panic—the century of love and loss—colored his perception. He saw the way they looked at each other, the space around them charged and quiet.
“You fixed it,” Lucien stated softly, not to Bucky, but to Dante.
Dante didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He put a hand on Lucien’s shoulder, his touch firm and reassuring. “We’re working on it.” He looked back at Steve and Tony, the soldier’s mask settling over his features once more, though it was softer at the edges now. “We need a place to crash. Somewhere that isn’t a lab or a linen closet.”
“Safe house,” Steve said, nodding. “Upstate. Isolated. Fully stocked.”
“And a grocery store,” Bucky added, his voice rough but calm. His eyes were on Dante, a silent conversation continuing. “For the chocolate milk.”
Lucien leaned slightly, almost imperceptibly, into Dante’s side. The panic had receded, leaving behind a deep, watchful exhaustion and the dawning understanding that his father was not alone here. That he, Lucien, might not be alone either. The thought was terrifying. And it was a fragile, budding hope.
And it was a fragile, budding hope.
The safe house was a low-slung, modernist structure of glass and weathered cedar, nestled in a dense pocket of upstate forest. It smelled of pine needles and the faint, clean scent of rain on stone. Lucien walked through the front door behind his father, his movements cautious, as if the polished concrete floors might dissolve beneath his feet.
He didn’t speak. His eyes tracked everything—the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the dark woods, the sleek kitchen, the deep, comfortable-looking sofa. It was so profoundly, mundanely real. It felt more alien than the obsidian plains.
“Pick any room down that hall,” Steve said, dropping a duffel by the door. “They’re all made up.”
Lucien glanced at Dante, a silent question. Dante gave a slight nod. “Go on. Claim some space. No one’s taking it from you.”
With that permission, Lucien moved, a shadow slipping down the corridor to disappear into the first doorway. The soft click of a lock engaging echoed in the quiet living room.
“Kid’s got good instincts,” Tony muttered, shrugging out of his jacket. He sunk into a wide armchair opposite the couch, the leather sighing under his weight.
Steve busied himself in the open-plan kitchen, filling a kettle, the domestic sounds of clinking ceramic and running water somehow loud. Bucky lingered by the granite island, watching the hallway. Dante stood in the center of the room, motionless, as if listening to the silence of the house, testing its weight.
They heard the shower turn on down the hall. It ran for a long time.
When Lucien emerged, his hair was dark and damp, curling at the nape of his neck. He wore simple grey sweats and a white t-shirt that Steve had left on the bed, the fabric swimming on his lean frame. He looked younger. He looked clean. He paused in the doorway to the living area, taking in the tableau: Tony in the chair, Steve drying a mug, Bucky by the island, Dante now perched on the arm of the sofa.
His green eyes, clear and exhausted, settled on the carton of chocolate milk Bucky had placed on the counter.
“It’s yours,” Bucky said, his voice not unkind.
Lucien padded over, retrieved it, and wordlessly went back to his room. The door closed again, but this time the lock didn’t turn.
The group let out a collective, unconscious breath. The first hurdle was cleared.
Night deepened outside the windows, a pure blackness punctuated by the chirp of crickets. The lights in Lucien’s room had been off for an hour. Dante finally moved from his perch, sinking fully into the cushions of the sofa. He leaned his head back, closing his eyes, the lines of tension in his neck finally easing.
Bucky crossed the room and sat beside him, not touching, but close enough that their thighs almost brushed. The space between them hummed with the memory of the console room, with the raw words spoken in the dark.
Steve finished in the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. “I’m turning in. You two should get some real sleep, too.”
“In a minute,” Dante said, without opening his eyes.
Steve offered a small, understanding smile and disappeared down the other hallway.
Tony, from his armchair, watched them. He swirled the last of his scotch in the glass, the ice cubes clinking. His gaze was assessing, stripping away the drama to the practical heart of the matter. He looked at the hallway where Lucien slept, then back at Dante.
“Eighteen?” Tony asked. The single word hung in the quiet room.
Dante opened his eyes. They were grey and tired in the lamplight. He knew what Tony was really asking: Is he a kid, or is he something else? He gave a slow, single nod.
“Time works differently down there,” Dante said, his voice a low rumble. “The infernal realms. The celestials. It’s… elastic. He’s considered one hundred and eight down there.”
Bucky’s head turned sharply at that. A century. The kid had endured a century in that place. The math was a cold fist in his gut.
Tony absorbed this, his expression unreadable. He took a final sip. “You gonna teach him how to use and control his powers? Before he accidentally shatters my tensile-reinforced windows because a squirrel surprises him?”
“I planned on it,” Dante said, a thread of defensive steel in his tone. “That was always the plan. Before.”
The ‘before’ hung there, heavy with the weight of the interrupted life, the seventy-year gap. Tony nodded, accepting it. He unfolded himself from the chair, setting the empty glass down with a soft tap.
“Good,” he said simply. “Get some sleep, boys. Try not to break the safe house.” With a last, casual salute, he ambled off to claim a guest room, leaving them alone in the low light.
The silence that followed was different. It was theirs. The hum of the refrigerator, the sigh of the wind in the pines outside.
Bucky shifted, turning his body toward Dante on the couch. “A hundred and eight years,” he murmured.
“He doesn’t remember most of it linearly,” Dante said, staring at his own hands. “Time in a sensory-deprivation oubliette isn’t counted in days. It’s counted in panic attacks and the intervals between them. He’s eighteen in experience. In trauma. In everything that matters.”
“He saw us,” Bucky said, the statement quiet. “In the med-bay. When he… when he pulled my memories. He knows.”
Dante finally looked at him. “He knows I loved you. He knows you left. He probably knows you’re the reason I spent seventy years building a metaphorical bomb to blow a hole in reality.” He said it without malice, a flat recitation of cause and effect. “Now he knows you’re back.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“For him?” Dante considered it, his gaze drifting toward the hallway. “I don’t think so. For me? It’s the only thing that isn’t a problem right now.”
He reached over, his fingers finding Bucky’s where they rested on the couch cushion. He laced their hands together, metal and flesh, his thumb stroking over Bucky’s knuckles. The touch was simple. Profound.
They talked then, in hushed tones that wouldn’t carry. Not about the past, not yet. About the immediate future. About the safe house’s security, about what Lucien might need, about the strange, quiet fact of sitting together on a couch. The words were practical, but the undercurrent was a steady, deepening thrum of reconnection.
At some point, the talking faded. Bucky lifted his arm, draping it along the back of the sofa, an open invitation. Dante looked at him, his eyes shadowed, and then slowly leaned in, letting his head rest on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky’s hand came up to cradle the back of his head, fingers threading through the dark, slightly unkempt hair.
Dante turned his face, his breath warm against Bucky’s neck. Bucky tilted his own head down, his lips finding Dante’s temple. It was a kiss of gratitude, of wonder.
It deepened naturally, inevitably. Dante turned further, his mouth meeting Bucky’s. This kiss was nothing like the ones in the Tower. There was no desperation in it, no seventy years of famine to feed. This was slow. This was discovery. This was the luxury of time they thought they’d lost.
Bucky’s metal hand came up to frame Dante’s jaw, his thumb stroking the sharp line of his cheekbone. Dante sighed into the kiss, his body relaxing fully for the first time since Bucky had seen him crumpled on the borderlands. One of his hands fisted softly in the fabric of Bucky’s shirt, an anchor.
They stayed like that for a long while, lost in the quiet, mapping the familiar territory of each other’s mouths, speaking a silent, physical language of forgiveness and return.
In the darkened hallway, a door stood open just a crack.
Lucien watched from the shadows, his face pale in the sliver of light from the living room. He saw his father, who carried a century of solitude like a second skeleton, now soft and pliant in the arms of the soldier. He saw the easy way Bucky held him, the protective curve of his body. He saw the kiss, not hungry, but deep and sure.
He didn’t say a word. A small, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips, there and gone in the dark. His dad was happy. Actually happy. The concept was so foreign, so dazzling, it felt like a secret he’d been gifted.
He pulled his door closed without a sound, the latch engaging with the softest click. He crawled back into the bed, the sheets cool, the weight of the real blanket a comfort he was still learning to trust. As he drifted back toward sleep, the last thing he felt was not fear, but a fragile, spreading warmth in his chest.
On the couch, the kissing gradually slowed, settled into soft, drowsy presses. Dante’s breathing evened out, his body growing heavier against Bucky’s side. Bucky shifted carefully, sliding down so he was half-reclining, his back against the corner of the sofa.
Dante went with the motion, instinctively arranging himself, his head finding its home on Bucky’s chest, right over his steady heartbeat. One arm draped across Bucky’s waist. Bucky pulled the throw blanket from the back of the couch over them both, his hand coming to rest on Dante’s back, feeling the rise and fall of his breath.
Within minutes, Dante was asleep, his features smoothed of their perpetual brood, looking every one of his twenty-three years.
Bucky stayed awake a little longer, listening to the wind, to Dante’s breathing, to the profound quiet of a house at peace. He pressed his lips once more to the top of Dante’s head. Then he let his own eyes close, the solid, living weight on his chest the only proof he needed that some wounds, against all odds, could still mend.