Heart and Eye: Deleted Scenes
When writing a story as long as Heart and Eye, you tend to plan ahead for certain things. Who will die, which couples will get together, who goes on which adventures and so on. However, when you get to the place where you planned on using them, you will find that not all of them will end up working for a number of reasons. Maybe you changed your mind, maybe the fans didn't like that plot device when you used it earlier or maybe it just doesn't fit the tone that you were trying for. Anyway, I mentioned that some of the scenes were different or deleted and a couple of readers expressed an interest in seeing them so I have decided to put a few of them together. Some of them are scenes that I had actually written and had later cut and some of them are reconstructions of ideas that I had that I never ended up writing.
If I had gone with some of these ideas (or some of these pairings) I reckon that the story would have gone in an entirely different direction.
Enjoy (or seeing as they were deleted, don't).
~o~O~o~
#1 Chapter Ninety-One
There was a certain piece of interaction between Xander and Dawn that I had planned for a while but had to cut when I realised that Jesse was not going to stand still for twenty seconds.
The Holy Water instantly exploded upon contact with Jesse's body and he howled with a combination of rage and pain. He collapsed to the ground and frantically clawed at his leg. Dawn looked at Xander and knew what he was thinking just by his expression.
He wanted to fight on his own.
"No way," she said, entirely resolute.
"I know what I'm doing," he said with confidence.
"I am not letting you do this on your own," she insisted.
"Dawn," he said fiercely before grabbing her face and kissing her full on the mouth. In a single instant she lost track of everything else until she could hear a cold metallic click. "You are so going to hate me for this," he said apologetically as she looked down at her wrist that had been handcuffed to bar. He smiled slightly at her infuriated expression before turning to meet the incoming blow from the enraged vampire.
This was cut as I realised that there was absolutely no way Jesse would stand still long enough for that to happen. I didn't want to cut it as I really liked it but it was just one of those things. Instead of getting restrained, I broke Dawn's leg so it would still be a one on one fight. Seeing as, unlike Winifred, she did not have a husband with a bomb around his neck, I knew that she wouldn't just sit out of the fight.
~o~O~o~
#2 Fred/Xander relationship
This was an early, early idea I had knocking around when I first started the story. In fact, a few of my first readers actually picked up on some of the hints that I had. I knew that I wanted to give Xander a new love interest and I also knew that I didn't want to re-tread ground covered with the Anya romance.
What stopped this from happening?
I watched the last episodes of Angel. HUGE mistake. I knew that I was going to kill his new love interest because she was not going to take over the story and make it anything other than an urban fantasy (I was VERY wrong) and I was thinking, "Fred's going to die already, no biggie." I was wrong. I realised that I simply didn't have it in my heart to kill her and that, since this is the purpose of fan fiction, I really, really wanted her and Wesley to have a happy end together. The final thing that stopped this from happening was when I was writing the end of chapter seven. I knew that I wanted Harmony and Xander to bicker as their (not so) epic fight in Season 4 is one of my favourite scenes in the entire franchise so I put her in the bar that he was sitting in.
And then this thought drifted through my head, "What if he kissed her?"
I swear that I had no idea just how much the story was going to focus on their relationship, however they reactions to them were just so much fun that I had to continue.
Anyway, here are some of the ideas that I had.
In the early days I had thought that it would be Fred and not Lorne who would find Xander a place to rent and he takes her out as a thank you.
"No I'm serious," Xander laughed, "We all had these bows and arrows (Sunnydale never had a metal detector) and swords and just charged at the Mayor who at this point had gone all Jafar and turned into a hundred foot high snake."
"Wait, hang on a minute," Fred interrupted, "He did this at the school graduation, in broad daylight, oh whatever, eclipse and somehow that doesn't make the front page of every newspaper on the planet. Didn't anyone have a blog or something?"
"I actually thought about that," Xander replied, using his fork to play with his pasta, "Giles – Rupert, he had this theory about Sunnydale. He thought that because Sunnydale was built over a Hellmouth, people would just naturally tune that sort of thing out unless they were directly in the know. They just assumed that lots of people tripped and fell on barbeque forks. I called it Sunnydale Syndrome." She laughed in response.
"That's actually pretty good," she admitted before looking at his fork. "You doing all right there?" she asked.
"I'm fine," he replied quickly, "Just been a while since I was in a restaurant like this, a couple of years now and I haven't really worried too much about table manners recently."
"What did you do?" she asked, "You keep dropping these hints but you never really come and say anything."
"There's actually not all that much to tell," he said, "I just moved around a lot. Really, the most exciting thing to happen to me was what happened in Peru… Wait no, that thing with Dracula."
"You met Dracula?" she exclaimed incredulously.
"Oh yeah," he replied, flashing a quick grin at her, "He totally had a crush on me."
"Seriously?" she replied with scepticism, her left eyebrow ceding from the rest of her face and moving up north.
"Hey," he said defensively, "It just means that he has great taste. I don't know if you've noticed this but I am a damn handsome man." She wasn't sure if he was joking or not until he started laughing. It was infectious and pretty soon she had joined in too.
That's really as far as I got with their date thing. To be honest I kind of had gotten a severe case of writer's block so I skipped ahead to other things. I did write a morning after scene but didn't really have any context for it and it ultimately got scrapped pretty quickly. Really the only thing I remember was that Fred was going to be feeling down about Wesley not responding to her advances (this was based before Smile Time, remember) and ended up latching onto Xander. I didn't really like that as it made her seem kind of weak and out of character. I don't think that the writing in either this scene or the one before it is particularly awful but it just didn't match the fun that Xander and Harmony's bickering brought. Not only that but I really hadn't got the hang of writing sexual encounters at that time. Finally, as you may have noticed, Xander was a huge jerk to Harmony (admittedly she was evil at the time) when they started dating and I just couldn't see him doing that to Fred who is the nicest person in the franchise behind Tara.
Fred looked over at the still sleeping Xander and furrowed her brows curiously. Did he always where his eye patch to bed, she wondered, or was it just when he had company?
Company.
She pursed her lips as she thought about the implications of the word as he stirred.
"Hey," she said gently as his eye fluttered open.
"You, yourself," he replied, smiling slightly.
"How was your night?" she asked, wondering why she was suddenly being so flirty. Admittedly she wasn't really in a position to be all that prudish as he did have an unimpeded view of her naked chest.
"It was pretty alright," he replied.
"Do anything fun?" He shrugged.
"Well I did take advantage of an emotionally vulnerable woman, you?" he answered smoothly to which she responded by chucking.
"Ha," she deadpanned, "Well I slept with a guy almost ten years younger than me."
"No way," he replied.
"Way." They both suddenly burst into laughter. He brushed his fingers over her shoulder, slowly moving down her body. "What the heck happened?" she asked, letting her head collapse against the pillow, "We were just hanging out." His hand had reached her chest and it lingered there for a while.
"It was bound to happen when we started watching TV and the only thing on was procedurals," he said, "We had to stave off the boredom somehow." His hand started to roam again.
"Yeah," she agreed before sighing. "This should really just be a one off thing," she said seriously, "I mean, we work together and… I think it would just be… Oh…" He voice trailed off as his fingers found where her legs met her abs. She arched her spine and softly gasped. "Maybe a two off thing?" she backpedalled quickly before pushing his hand away and wrapping her legs around him.
See what I mean? Just not my best work
~o~O~o~
I hope you enjoyed this and if you did I will post some more examples later.