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Preserved: After the rescue of the 107th, Steve Rogers cashes in all of his favors and makes what deals he can to get Bucky a medical discharge from the Army, sending him home to Brooklyn and far from enemies and curious scientists both. But Steve’s war goes on until it ends badly, in an exploding plane over the Black Sea. Captain America is presumed dead, his shield recovered and returned to a grieving America while his body remains undiscovered.
Seven years later, a new danger is threatening to unbalance the already-roiling Cold War: a Soviet assassin let loose from behind the Iron Curtain. Peggy Carter isn’t sure she wants to believe that the assassin is a super-soldier because of what it could mean, but she does know that whoever it is, she’ll have to break her promise to keep Bucky Barnes far from danger.
Preserved, Chapter Four: Bucky
34K words/65K total | PG-13-ish | Bucky Barnes, Peggy Carter
"We can use our own resources to find him and we will, but once we do, what happens after that… You are the best option we have, the best option we could hope for to bring him back alive. Not only because you are the best equipped, physically, to survive an encounter with a super-soldier, which matters more than you realize. But also — more importantly — because you are going to be the one who waits the longest to say that it can’t be done."
It took Bucky a moment to realize what Stark was saying, but when he did, he looked straight at Peggy, who looked straight back and let him see the fear and the grief she’d been trying to hide.
"You want me to bring him back if I can or kill him if I can’t," he said softly, his anger bleeding out into something like horror.
Peggy nodded once. “We will get only one chance to bring him home,” she answered, a faint smile on her lips before it disappeared. “Once the Soviets know we’ve figured out who he really is, they’ll hide him where we’d never get to him again. Keeping him active behind the Iron Curtain wouldn’t be enough; we’d find him eventually. They’ll do something more drastic. I don’t think they’ll kill him, not when they haven’t cracked the serum, but they can make him — and us — wish they had. If they’re capable of doing what they’ve already done, imagine what they would do to keep from losing him and the potential of his body, losing the punchline to the best joke of the Cold War. What they would do to keep from getting caught.”
