Cut Scenes Index

I'm mostly keeping this to large swathes I cut out of the original version of project star-eater. These days, I tend to keep what I call a "cuts" document where I put all of the sections I've cut out of my writing, in case I want to revisit or reuse them later. The most I have for the original version of PSE is this abandoned version of chapter 13 that I clearly fell asleep writing.

The "omake" extras are bonus scenes that I largely jotted down when working on the original PSE rewrite. They're just for fun, little interactions I can see playing out.

xx13 i slept in last night's clothes and tomorrow's dreams

Bucky can't sleep.

No matter how he tries or what he does, his overworked mind refuses to silence itself and stop turning and turning and turning. Every thought is like a hot coal added to a raging fire until it all burns cold and takes the world with it. There's a burning behind his eyes that clouds his vision like smoke and static. His mind rages all the time with blood and war, reliving sticky dark nights in Ukraine at the same time as cool French coastal mornings. Steve goes from frien to enemy, from stranger to target, mystery to the person he knows better than himself. And all day, itching at the back of his mind, his old name, the name, Bucky, Bucky, Bucky.

He's not used to it yet.

Nata is a shadow to him, a flitting apparition watching him with sharp electric camera eyes in the corner of the room. She doesn't talk much. They have a mutually-understood silence, the kind that comes from years of synchronized fighting and training, from having brains that worked the same way before whatever They stuffed inside to destroy free will. His silence with Steve is different--it's tense most of the time, rather than understood. Bucky and Nata (he's Yasha to her) speak the same language.

Steve is completely alien to him once more. When he's in the cell, it's Bucky who feels like a shadow. A ghost, lying on the mattress, making no indentation and leaving nothing but a chilling of air where his body is. The language they share is the same, constructed out of hand movements and short questions and timed silences, but it's been years since either of them have used it. Trying to speak it is like grasping at straws for an empty memory, something that should be there but isn't quite. There is so much space in his head where there used to be pieces of his identity, his memories.

Yet Steve treats him like he hasn't changed, though maybe he's more careful. Bucky sure as hell doesn't feel like himself, but he doesn't remember what it felt like to be Bucky Barnes. If Steve treats him like Bucky, then maybe he's still that person somewhere. Maybe there's still hope for him.

That doesn't make it any less hard when he wants to kill Steve. Steve, who trusts him like a fool, who sleeps defenseless beside an living rumor of an international assassin with a known mission to kill him. Steve, who doesn't begrudge the invisible knives in his hands that he's used to kill Steve so many times in his head.

Bucky does not want to hurt Steve. More balanced in his head, he's able to overrule the instincts telling him to strike the finishing blow and report to HYDRA. But he doesn't want to, he can't. Maybe that's why Steve trusts him.

Bucky is filled with lies and vitriol and nightmares from his time There, from the decades he spent asleep in ice or pressed down at the back of his head. Even though the scars have faded, he can still feel the lashes against his back, taste the coals in his mouth, remember everything They did to prove and break him all at once. He's more of a weapon than a man now, but maybe that's how he's always been. First Steve's, then the Allied Powers', then HYDRA's. Even if he could fight without killing, Bucky will never allow himself to be used as a weapon ever again.

Steve visits in the evening, waking Bucky while he moves from irrate violence to quiet, scared self-awareness. It's like flicking a switch and watching a light very slowly come to life. The painful moments between sight and recognition stall his heart, make his head hurt as he struggles to remember the most important person in his life. In all of his lives. Even when he didn't remember Steve Rogers, his existence was centered on Captain America, besting him, improving upon him, and one day, destroying him. When They sent him on that last mission, it was the closest thing he'd felt to joy in that state. Weapons don't feel. But a weapon fulfilling one of the reasons for its existence cannot help but feel glee at the idea.

When he looks at Steve and sees a target instead of a friend, it makes him sick to his stomach. Bucky doesn't want that feeling, that immediate jerk in the back of his head that almost forces him to reach out and press his thumbs against the exposed throat in front of him. It would be so easy. He can't help but imagine the hundreds of ways he could kill Steve without making a noise, and he can't help the perverse excitement that stings at the back of his stomach.

Perhaps the worst result of all these horrible circumstances is Bucky himself. He hates himself more than he even hates Them. He should be able to override the programming, he should be able to see through the dark glasses and see Steve as an ally and never an enemy, but he can't. They linger around his brain like dark, dense fog, phasing in and out of crevices and filling the space.

He wonders if Steve knows how much he wants to die.

Bucky wakes up sweating, screaming, and heaving from another dream where he killed Steve, wrists-deep in warm wet flesh. He pins his hands behind his back so they can't move of their own accord. Beside him, Steve sleeps peacefully. Hidden blue eyes move beneath their lids, letting him watch as Steve dreams. When he's asleep, he looks as young as he did when they shared a flat for the first time in their 20s. They're in their 90s now (almost 100s, for Bucky), and there is no place Bucky would rather be than Steve's arms.

[Note: I think I fell asleep in the middle of writing this. I am keeping this part in for humor and also to demonstrate why I really shouldn't write after my sleep meds kick in.]

Steve could pin his arms to his sides and prevent Bucky from doing anything bad. He could drop Bucky off at the play center at the front of the store, to glance around nervously for dark uniforms and mouth masks. An otherwise-unoccupied employee could watch him with distant eyes. And Bucky would want to, would apologize, but he's find himself out of words once again. It's a lot easier to lose words now than it used to be. They turned Bucky's mind into a careening whirlpool of memories and data and snippets of thought.

Bucky reaches out gently and brushes a fallen lock of hair off Steve's face. He hasn't had his hair cut in a while either, at this point, and Bucky's never seen him with hair longer than his ears. As always, he looks good. Steve could appear one day in stained overalls, smelling like horse shit, and his smile and presence would still draw crowds of people too distracted with his eyes to notice the smell. And Bucky's seen the way people look at him when he pushes through them to access Steve and tell him they need to go. He's not completely oblivious--just a little slow. But those lowering eyebrows and curling tentacle pads always him too nervous to stick around. He ends up shooting a hook up to the edge of the hole up, swinging over Steve's adoring fans to get through the hole, onto the second floor.

Crystalline blue eyes open slowly and Bucky pulls his hand away, drops his gaze to the pillow under Steve's head. Just because he can make eye contact with Steve doesn't mean it's any less difficult.

"I knew Natasha was a Jedi," Steve says, once it's all over.

"What, because she said 'I have a bad feeling about this'? The thing they say in every movie?" Tony asks.

"What? The only people who ever say that are either Jedi or otherwise Force-sensitive. And shut your trap, Stark," Steve spins round to face Tony directly, "there's no way Kylo Ren would be that strong with the Force if Han wasn't Force-sensitive."

"Wait, if we're bringing in the new ones, does that mean Bucky's Finn?" Clint asks.

"Then I get to be Poe," says Tony.

"No, Steve's the rash ace pilot. He gets to be Poe." Clint crosses his arms.

"Yes! I knew Finn and Poe were totally a thing!" Peter says from the other room.

"Where did you get that guy, again?" Steve asks Tony under his breath.

"And Rey and Rose," Nat adds, "they're definitely a thing."

"Jesus, do you want to see Star Wars Episode IX: The Big Gay Date or something?" asks Tony.

"Yes," Steve, Peter, Natasha, and Clint say in unison.

"Stark's really good at forgetting he's bisexual and has been dating his boyfriend for twice as long as he's dated his girlfriend, isn't he?" Bucky asks.

Steve sighs. "Just another piece of the mystery that is Tony Stark."

"Geez, at least Howard was a straightforward enough fella," Bucky comments. "Wine, women, and, uh, what was that third thing?"

"More wine and women."

"Yeah, that."

"I heard he never cheated on Maria, though."

"Huh," Bucky says. "You think you know a guy..." He shoots a devious look at Steve. "Then again, I thought you were straight for eighty years, so..."