Chapter Text
Barbatos has been with the royal family for as long as he can remember.
He’s been their toy, experiment, since.. well, he can’t remember.
At first, he was only a simple demon, living a life—maybe strong and promising, but nothing special. Until he was found, and.. well, taken.
From there he was experimented on for years, it’s where he forgot most of his memories. Time molded together, he’s not sure how long he was in that lab. Generations, at least. He gained time-based abilities, although they were dulled by special injections so he could not use them to escape. He became more powerful, but more measures were taken to subdue him. Brainwashing, to an extent. Shock collar and bracelets and anklets, even a shock chip embedded in his neck in a way that paralyzes him when activated.
Until Diavolo’s father freed him. Let him have a life in the castle. He was treated like a real person, albeit expected to serve as a butler for little pay. But it’s fine—payment was freedom and a lack of experiments, wasn’t it? It was enough.
And then.. and then Diavolo came.
He was a master at trickery. Gain trust, rip it away, place it right back where it started and repeat.
He fooled the public into believing he was sweet, used his father’s stern way of speaking and action to trick everybody into believing he was not a good father.
But behind closed doors, he looked for every excuse to punish Barbatos. Every mess up, every lie he could use to get away with it.
And now that his father is gone?
He’s no reason to lie.
Oh, how delightful for Diavolo: Barbatos was in the palm of his hands, just as he’d always wanted.
Basically: Diavolo takes his anger and stress out on Barbatos, any chance he gets. There’s other experiments, of course, but they’re all so weak. So many die within one or two experiments.
Sometimes, he’ll even force Barbatos to preform experiments on experiments. It’s quite entertaining to see how Barbatos breaks bit by bit as he’s forced to hurt and even *kill* others, in such excruciating ways.
But Diavolo grows bored. Barbatos is fun, but he can only do so much with *one* powerful experiment.
He needs another one. A strong one. One that can handle the extent of experiments he wants to perform, that a weak demon cannot handle and that may hinder Barbatos’ ability to perform his tasks as royal butler, or make it difficult for him to hide everything going on behind closed doors.
And so he goes to the next strongest demons he knows: The brothers.
Lucifer is far to beneficial as he is, doing so much work for him. Knowing Lucifer’s pride, he may stop if he’s subjected to experiments, even if it only leads to more torture.
And so, who’s next up?
Mammon.
He’s perfect.
He doesn’t do much work, his grades are low so honestly him being missing will only benefit the brother’s reputation grade-wise. He steals things so much, Lucifer’s constantly taken from his work to enact punishments. With Mammon gone, that headache is too. Besides, none of the family pays much attention to Mammon. They’ll never suspect he was taken, kidnapped; If anything, they’ll suspect he ran away, with his track record and all.
So of course, he does it—he takes Mammon, subjecting him to experimentation and torture.
Barbatos is aware.
In fact, Diavolo adores making Barbatos experiment on Mammon.
The betrayal in the avatar’s eyes, the emptiness in Barbatos’ as he does his job but the pure fear beforehand and self-disgust afterward.
…
Anyway, Barbatos eventually grows sick of this and decides to rescue Mammon.
It’s at his own risk, he still has those shock items. But he manages to get rid of Mammon’s and even knowing Diavolo might kill him (or worse), he can’t stand by and let this happen anymore.
..maybe he’s fallen for Mammon. Maybe he has a habit of sneaking into Mammon’s room when Diavolo isn’t around to apologize and lift his pain for a bit, to give him company and somebody to speak to. Because he knows all too well what being trapped in the facility full-time, subjected to so much torture, is like.