Oooh, something that got cut…
There was a part in the captain’s cabin, when Flint talks about how a captain needs a fairlead and he mentions Billy, when Silver asks him exactly what happened on the side of the ship. I dithered over it for a while because the show hadn’t answered the question yet (and I knew they were going to), but also because I ultimately decided Silver didn’t care what had happened on the side of the ship. He already knew Flint was vicious when he had to be, so knowing what really happened to Billy wouldn’t have made him more or less afraid of Flint - which he is, because he has a healthy self-preservation instinct. Ultimately, when I started writing this section the fic started going in a completely different direction and I was really struggling with it, so I got rid of it.
I can’t give you exact words because I’m very much of the “kill your darlings” school of writing. If I cut something, it’s deleted and gone forever. I write, edit and re-write in the same document, so it’s very rare that my “rough drafts” survive. The only exceptions are things I wrote by hand waaaaaay early in my writing career and those are things I never want to see the light of day, thank you very much. I do have a print copy of Night Shift, one of my original works, but that’s because I got it for free when I won NaNoWriMo, and it’s getting very heavily marked up in black pen.