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ifmywishescametrue · 1 year

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Wait, I know I’m late but outtakes for “Like Dominoes” ???

Outtakes for one of my favorite fics ever?? 👀 hello?

If you were ever planning on sharing them, you’d honestly make my week :)

omg yeah i didn't know i had outtakes for the longest time but i can definitely share them now. i'll try to provide context but it's been a long while since i wrote them, so the memories are more than a little hazy lol

all of that below the cut, because it's pretty long!

outtake one:

written to take place sometime after chapter 23, i guess? i think at one point, the fic was supposed to go for longer and actually include thanksgiving with bucky's family, or at least a few paragraphs that covered what happened there. but, that didn't happen, so this scene wasn't needed. i still like it, though, even if it's incomplete (and not proofread lol)

It’s still dark when Bucky wakes up, the kind of pitch black that lets him know even with his eyes closed that it’s before dawn. He rolls over to mash his face into the pillow, and it takes a moment to realize that on a normal night, he shouldn’t have been able to do that quite so easily.

Blindly, he reaches out to the other side of the bed, only to be met by cold, empty sheets. He lifts his head, squinting into the darkness, and the neon blue of the clock says it's 4:36. Far too early to wake up alone.

A muffled clang is just faintly audible through the walls, and Bucky tosses back the covers to find what he already knows will be the source.

He catches the scent of vanilla and sugar when opens the bedroom door, and he follows the light casting down the hall back to the kitchen.

Every surface is covered in something. All sizes of mixing bowls and baking trays, silicone stirring spoons, and a dusting of flour here and there. In the middle of all of it is Tony, with his entire focus on one misshapen gingerbread man and a steady hand outlining his body in white icing from a piping bag.

Bucky folds his arms over his chest and leans against the archway, waiting for him to finish before breaking into his concentration. “Baking cookies couldn’t have waited until tomorrow?”

Tony jolts a little, hand tightening on the bag to make a stream of icing shoot out onto the counter. It narrowly misses the next cookie in the row, and Tony wipes it away with his finger.

“It's technically tomorrow, isn't it?” He looks over his shoulder at the time on the microwave. “See? A few hours into it already.”

The corner of Bucky's mouth twitches. “And where did you get all these supplies? Last I checked, we didn’t have at least half of this.”

“There’s a 24-hour supermarket about thirty minutes away.”

“You went to the store in the middle of the night?” Bucky asks, brow furrowed. His eyes drift down Tony’s body, taking in his rumpled t-shirt and baggy flannel pants. “You’re in your pajamas.”

Tony shrugs, “There’s not a whole lot of room for judgment from other people also there at two in the morning.”

Bucky drops his arms and comes further into the kitchen, and Tony sets down the piping bag as he approaches. He looks tired, with shadows under his eyes and specks of powdered sugar in his unkempt hair. Bucky reaches for him and pulls him closer by the hip.

“What's the matter?” he asks softly.

“Why are you assuming something’s wrong?”

“Well, in my admittedly limited life experience, people don't usually go on baking frenzies before sunrise if they're doing perfectly fine,” Bucky says, brushing away the cinnamon from Tony's cheek. “I mean, you could be the first, but you're looking pretty dead on your feet, baby. What’s keeping you up?”

Tony shuffles closer, resting his forehead against Bucky’s sternum, and sighs at the first sweep of Bucky’s fingers through his hair, “I fell asleep for a little while, but then I had this weird dream that I was in the lab and there was an issue with the project but I couldn’t figure out the problem and everything was going wrong, so I woke up feeling stressed, and then my mind started drifting to everything else that I have to do, which reminded me that I wanted to do something to thank your mom for being so nice and welcoming over Thanksgiving break, but I couldn’t think about what exactly. Some article online suggested a handwritten note, but that felt kind of weird. You know, writing my feelings or whatever. That’s just awkward for everyone involved. So I landed on their second suggestion, which was basically this. I wasn’t really sure what she would like, though, and I didn’t want to wake you up to ask because you’ve got that early shift today, so I picked a couple of different recipes, and then I had to go to the store to get everything I needed, and now we’re here.”

Bucky hums, dipping his head down to press a kiss to the top of Tony’s. “Your mind is quite the place to be in, isn’t it? Must be like a maze in there.”

“More like if you took a bunch of different balls of yarn and threw them in the washing machine together, then tried to untangle it after,” Tony snorts. “But anyway, I figured since I’m already making stuff, I’d do peanut butter cookies for Rhodey, and those chocolate cookies that Steve and Nat like. Make it like an early Christmas thing for our friends and your family.”

“Sweetheart,” Bucky says, pinching the bridge of his nose, and Tony sighs again.

“I know, I know. It’s too much, and I’m overwhelmed now that I’m actually doing it, and I have about a million regrets, but I’ve started it, and now I have to finish it even if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Or you could finish in the morning,” Bucky suggests. “After you've gotten more than an hour of sleep.”

“Or I could finish now and sleep when I'm dead,” Tony counters, flashing him a grin.

Bucky looks around the kitchen again. Almost all of the gingerbread people are frosted, and the peanut butter cookies look to be cooling on a rack off to the side, while the chocolate chip ones are already packaged in tupperware. The timer on the oven is set to go off in a few minutes with a batch of something else, and there's another baking tray waiting on the stove to go in next.

“How much more do you have?” he asks.

“Not a lot. Just those last two batches, and then I can come back to bed.”

Bucky trails his hands along Tony's back, kneading his thumbs into Tony's shoulders for a moment. He does it again when Tony nearly moans at the touch.

outtakes two-four:

so when i first outlined this story, the ending was pretty much completely different. howard was still supposed to show up, but bucky was going to agree to his offer to divorce tony. it was meant to be a selfless thing (in bucky's mind, at least) to give up his relationship with tony so that tony could have his normal life back. but the more i wrote and the closer i got to the end, i just kept asking myself "would bucky do that, though?" and the answer was no. it didn't make sense anymore and going through with it as planned would've only served the purpose of creating angst for angst's sake. so i scrapped that ending, but some of it was already written. i guess it doesn't technically make these "outtakes," but it's a few pieces of the original/alternate ending.

for the first, here's a snippet from the aftermath, when tony's moving out of the apartment:

“You were supposed to go home for Thanksgiving,” Bucky says, and Tony pauses with a shirt held tight in his hand, his shoulders hunched and tense. “Your dad told me that he called you. Said he wanted to fix things and you turned him down.”

Tony shakes his head with a humorless laugh. “And did he tell you all his conditions? The weekly check-ins, monitoring my bank account, quitting my job in the lab because he wants to own every idea I’ll ever have. Oh, and let’s not forget that he still can’t wrap his head around the fact that I’m only into men, so I’d better find a girl that he can approve of to help clean up his image after everything else I’ve supposedly done to him. Gave me a list of candidates and everything.”

Bucky swallows hard, guilt turning his stomach. “Tony, I -”

“No,” Tony cuts him off, spinning around. His eyes are cold, and Bucky’s never seen him like this before. “I turned him down because I don’t need him. I don’t need someone controlling my life and making my decisions for me. I thought I was done with people who did that, but I guess not.”

Tony looks at him for a second longer, and Bucky feels frozen under his hurt, angry gaze. He should’ve known better, he thinks. Should’ve approached everything differently and taken even just a minute to think it through before it got this far.

He opens his mouth to say just that, but Tony sighs and turns back to roughly zip up his bag. “I’ll come back some other time for the rest.”

Tony’s shoulder brushes his own as he walks past him out of the bedroom, and the front door slams shut behind him before leaving him in the quiet.

and here's a scene of bucky talking to natasha about it:

“You didn’t just live together. You shared a bedroom and everything. Casual sex partners don't do that,” Nat says, but she doesn't stop there. “Neither one of you ever saw anyone else, and you would have both been pissed if you did. You kissed him without it leading to sex, you held his hand wherever you went, and you called him 'babe' more than his actual name. In fact, I'm pretty sure you never even called him his name to his face at all. I hate to break it to you, but that's just called being married. Actually, truly married.”

“Well, we were married, but that doesn't mean we were together. He didn’t want that, and frankly, I think it's a little sexist that you don't think two men can hold hands and just be friends.”

She gives him a flat look. “Is that really the argument you're choosing?”

Bucky nods, completely ready to double down. He's pretty sure it falls into the categories of at least two logical fallacies, but he doesn't care much for ethical debate right now. “Yeah, it is. It's a reflection of toxic masculinity, and honestly I thought you were better than that.”

“You were literally fucking each other.”

“As friends.”

“Married friends.”

“Friends who happened to be married,” Bucky corrects. “Just like I already told Steve.”

“And as I've said, neither of us believe you.”

Bucky shrugs, “That doesn't seem like my problem.”

Natasha looks at him with agony in her eyes. “Why are you so incredibly stupid?”

“It's not my fault you didn’t understand our dynamic.”

“Did you even understand your dynamic?”

Bucky hesitates and almost tells the truth. But if he doesn't say out loud that sometimes it was easy to forget that none of was real and sometimes he pushed boundaries on purpose just to see how far it could go, how many pieces of himself Tony would let him keep, then it's easier to pretend that everything is exactly the way he wants it to be and that he doesn't really want the one thing he can't have. If he tells the truth to Natasha, he can't keep lying to himself.

Bluntly, Natasha says, “You’re in love with him.”

He stops breathing for a second, and his heart skips over itself. It’s so much worse to hear it out loud. To hear her admit it when he can’t. Not in any way that matters, anyway.

“I do love him,” Bucky says slowly, “in the same way that I love you or Steve and sometimes Sam if he isn’t being annoying. That’s why I’m doing what’s best for him.”

a continuation of that i scene, i think? idk there was a gap between them in the document but i think it was supposed to be connected eventually lol:

“Please, Nat,” Bucky says, voice breaking on her name. “I’m really begging you to just let it go. And tell Steve to let it go, too. It’s not like that. It can’t be like that.”

and for the last "outtake," the laser tag line was always there in some way. i think this was supposed to be part of a getting-back-together scene:

“And why not?” she questions, unrelenting. “Because it would ruin things? You could lose him as a friend? Last I checked, you already did. I don’t why, because you won’t tell me, and despite the fact that I’ve called him a dozen times in the last two weeks, he won’t tell me either. All I know is that you fucked up, and he’s gone, which means you’ve got nothing left to lose.”

“You remember that bet we made?” Tony asks. “Laser tag. You said that I could have anything that I wanted.”

“Course I remember. You never used it, though.”

Tony twists his hand into the blanket, so tightly that his knuckles turn white. “I never used it because I already had everything I wanted.”

#answered asks #answered anon #i think this reveals more about me as a writer than i want it to lol #like my method for writing is doing random scenes and snippets however they pop into my head and hoping it'll all connect later #my writing

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