A Blast from the Past: Avengers Fireside Holiday “Yule Log” Videos

A peek inside the Avengers’ apartments during the holidays as we hang out by their fireplaces.

I posted these Marvel Fireside Heroes videos back in 2016 (between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War in the MCU timeline) and just came across them as I was looking at old holiday posts. They’re so much fun, I decided to share them with y’all once again, since most of us are on lockdown this holiday season and have been staring at the same screens for months. They are like Yule log videos, but instead we’re sitting in Steve Rogers’ apartment, listening to swing jazz versions of Christmas carols for an hour as we watch his fire, or on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s spaceship watching Baby Groot dance next to the fire.

Each video is filled with tiny details, like the pictures of Bucky, Peggy and his mom that Steve has next to the fire, and his original USO tour shield hung over the mantel. One chair leg is held up by a stack of books, because Steve is still a thrifty Depression era guy at heart. The apartment furnishings look like they could be straight from the forties, just like Steve himself. It’s a lonely looking place, from a lonely time in his life, but we could totally join him and make it better, right?

Captain America’s Brooklyn Apartment Fireside video. The close up version is above:

Under the cut: Thor, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, the Guardians & Deadpool

Continue reading “A Blast from the Past: Avengers Fireside Holiday “Yule Log” Videos”

A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 5: Captain America: Civil War from Berlin to Wakanda

This is the fifth and final part in my five part series about romantic StuckyNat, the story of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff falling in love with and wanting to be with each other. This part picks up in the middle of Captain America: Civil War, as Zemo is evaluating Bucky in his cell. It ends with the end of the movie. I’ve worked hard to keep the series canon compliant, so there’s no speculation about anything beyond the tags at the end of the film. ( I’d be happy to speculate in another post, just ask in the comments!)

Bucky couldn’t believe his ears as he heard the things this psychiatrist was saying to him. He’d known something was wrong even before the fake doctor had pulled out the red book and started reading his code words. Bucky panicked and started pounding his way out of the cell, as he felt himself disappearing inside his own mind again. He was left to watch helplessly as he hurt the two people he loved most in the world, again, nearly killed Howard’s son, and dozens of others. This nightmare would never be over. Even buried deep inside himself, barely aware, he was devastated. It didn’t matter how long he ran, or hid, or tried to avoid anything or anyone that could control him. He’d always be found and used. It was a relief when Steve finally knocked him out. He wanted to stay that way forever.
When he woke up, Bucky wasn’t sure where he was, only that his arm was restrained in an awkward position and he wasn’t back in a cell. Once again, he didn’t even try to get free. If the red book was back in play, it was better for everyone if he was contained. Steve looked like he didn’t know who Bucky was any more. Like Bucky had already used up all of his chances to prove that he was still Steve’s Bucky. Bucky himself wasn’t sure if he was Steve’s Bucky anymore.
Then they started talking. Bucky realized that the combination of Steve and Natasha’s presence, and that last cognitive recalibration, had restored a flood of memories he hadn’t had access to before. There was no time to sift through them all now, but he felt a rush of warmth at how much more familiar Steve felt to him. He’d known all along that he loved Steve, but he hadn’t had all of the memories to help him realize why, or to read Steve’s body language. Now much of that had come back to him, and it was like finally coming home. Even though he also realized that Steve didn’t quite love him back in the same way, Bucky still knew he’d lay down his life for Steve all over again.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 5: Captain America: Civil War from Berlin to Wakanda”

A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 4: Captain America: Civil War from Lagos to Berlin

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Part One   Part Two   Part Three   Part Five

This is the fourth part of a five part series on romantic StuckyNat. It tells the story of the MCU versions of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff from the point of view of all three characters as if they were in love with each other. This part covers the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, from the mission in Lagos, Nigeria to Bucky’s arrival and imprisonment in Berlin, Germany. Part five will cover the rest of the movie. The series is canon-compliant.


Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff had worked with their new recruits, Sam Wilson and Wanda Maximoff, intensively for the last year. They’d become a cohesive team. Wanda and Sam had earned the right to call themselves Avengers. With the rest of the Avengers busy with other projects or semiretired, the four of them had begun going out on missions together.

They’d been tracking Brock Rumlow for a few months when they became aware of the Lagos op. Steve and his team gathered what intel they could, then continued surveillance at the probable site. Once Rumlow’s vehicles had been spotted, the team pursued and intercepted the terrorists Rumlow was working with. Everyone remembered and used their training, working together and taking down an organized attack force. But then Rumlow caught Steve off guard, and manipulated him into overlooking a goddamn bomb strapped to Rumlow’s chest. Steve might not ever forgive himself for putting Wanda in the position of having to clean up after him. A position she wasn’t ready for yet, and which had terrible consequences.

The Lagos mission wasn’t a complete disaster, though the rest of the world acted like it was. Steve tried to remind himself of how much of the mission went right, before Rumlow played him so easily by invoking Bucky’s name. They’d worked well as a team, they’d stopped the theft of a bioweapon, and the new maneuvers that combined each person’s unique talents went off without a hitch. If only he hadn’t allowed himself to become distracted at the thought of new information about Bucky, grasping at any possibility, after so long without leads. Now Wanda, and all of the casualties in Lagos, were paying the price for his mistake. As a soldier Steve knew that mistakes were going to happen, you just had to keep going, and try to do the best you could with the situation. It was so much harder to cope with failure as an Avenger in the 21st century than it had been in his time. Now there were cameras everywhere and 24 hour news waiting to pounce and place blame. Somehow the Avengers never really got to tell their side of the story.

 Wanda had become like a daughter to him. They had so much in common, with them both being science experiments who had lost their soulmates, homes and families. Training her was a joy that finally brought some of the meaning back to his life that had been missing since Bucky fell. He was damned if he was going to let one accident, something that happened during the course of saving countless lives, be used as an excuse to put her under government control. She was a person first. It was time the world stopped thinking of human beings as weapons. That was no better than thinking of them as property. Wanda, Steve, Bucky, Thor, Bruce, and all of the other enhanced individuals belonged to themselves, not to any government. Bucky had already spent 70 years as property. Enough was enough.
That was his real problem with the Accords. He didn’t like that a government agency was taking control over their activities again, either, but they could negotiate on that. It was Ross’ attitude toward the enhanced, and the way he slanted and twisted his arguments to hide his real motivations, that made up Steve’s mind.
He saw how the sides were falling. The regular humans, and Tony’s creation Vision, on the side of government control. Steve and Wanda, the two enhanced, and Steve’s close, loyal friend Sam on the side of freedom. He was sad to see Natasha side with Tony. Steve understood and agreed with some of her reasoning, but he couldn’t risk what he knew the accords meant for people like himself, Bucky, and Wanda. He’d seen the concentration camps in Germany, and the Japanese internment camps in his own country. He’d seen what had been done to Bucky. Steve just couldn’t allow the potential for that type of abuse of power to become legal again. People’s fear of someone more powerful than them was not a just reason for imprisoning or owning others.
Then Steve got the call that Peggy had died, and every other thought left his head. He knew this was coming, but still, he was devastated. God, he missed Bucky so much. He was desperate to have Bucky by his side to say goodbye to Peg. She was almost his last link to the past. Bucky was the only other person he knew who would remember her, if Bucky even did remember her.
For the 3rd time in his life, he cried until there was nothing left in him. He cried for Peggy, for Bucky, for the future together they’d all lost. Peggy had told him, after he’d woken up in the 21st century to find attitudes about sex and sexualities very different from what he remembered, that she’d always known that he was in love with Bucky, too, and that Bucky was in love with him. She said she knew Steve loved her, and realized that he was probably bisexual. Peggy confessed to being bisexual as well, and having been in love with a woman before she settled down and married her husband. Steve was relieved to hear that Peggy was so accepting of the truth about him and Bucky, and grateful she was willing to share the truth about herself. Then she dropped the biggest bomb of all. Peggy told Steve that she hadn’t wanted to take him away from Bucky. Instead, she had a solution that might have worked for all of them. She and Steve could’ve gotten married, and Bucky could’ve been a 3rd person in their relationship, living with them equally, but appearing to be a roommate who’d never married as far as the rest of the world knew. She hadn’t said anything during the war because it didn’t seem like their relationship was at that point yet. She was waiting for the end of the war, when they could all actually get serious.
This, of course, floored Steve, since he hadn’t even realized he was in love with Bucky at that time. He had no idea how he would have reacted to the idea at first, or what would have happened in the long run, but it sounded like absolute heaven to him now. He was keeping it in the back of his head, should more miracles occur. Maybe he would get Bucky back, and wouldn’t lose Natasha in the argument over the Accords. Having a relationship with both Bucky and Nat would be his dream, if they were both open to it. He didn’t know how he’d even begin to bring it up, but he’d worry about that after those miracles occurred.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 4: Captain America: Civil War from Lagos to Berlin”

A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 3: The Ultron Era

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Part 1   Part 2   Part 4   Part 5

This is the third part of a five part series on romantic StuckyNat. It is my headcanon of the potential feelings of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff in the MCU, if the three were in love with each other. This part of the series covers the time from the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, through Avengers: The Age of Ultron, to just before the beginning of Captain America: Civil War. It is canon-compliant.

Once Bucky had found and destroyed all of the active Hydra bases he remembered, he went into hiding for real. He knew Steve was looking for him, and that Natasha was keeping tabs on him, because he was keeping tabs on both of them, too. While he’d recovered many of his memories, they were still patchy. The holes in Bucky’s memory further complicated the work of figuring out what they meant and what he wanted to do about them. On top of that, he was still the Winter Soldier. As long as he could be activated, it wasn’t safe for Bucky to be around the people he loved. He became a ghost again, disappearing in plain sight, moving to a new, out of the way city every few months. He kept his head down, and himself away from anything that would attract attention.

A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 2: 1945-The Winter Soldier

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This is the continuation of my 5 part headcanon series about StuckyNat (Steve, Natasha and Bucky). Part 1 is HERE. This series tells the story of what would be going on in the minds of Steve, Natasha and Bucky if all 3 were in love with each other. It follows the timeline of the 2 Avengers movies and the 3 Captain America movies. It is canon-compliant.

1945- The Original Avengers Assemble

Bucky Barnes was shocked when he woke up at the bottom of the ravine to find himself not dead. His body was a mess. He could barely think through the pain. He lay in the snow falling in and out of consciousness, wondering if he was hallucinating being alive. He didn’t have any clear thoughts, memories or feelings for decades to come after that. His body and mind weren’t his own.
Steve Rogers stayed in the back of Bucky’s mind through the whole 70 year long ordeal, a small kernel of hope and love that helped keep Bucky’s own identity alive and compartmentalized, no matter what they did to him or made him do. Even when they told him Steve was dead, something in him kept burning against all odds, buried so deep it was almost lost, waiting for the right time, the right trigger to break free. Until he saw the man on the bridge.
There were a few times that Bucky briefly came to the surface in the decades before Steve broke the Winter Soldier’s programming for good, like when he was forced to kill Howard. When he met and trained Natasha Romanoff in the Red Room, she brought him back to himself for a while. But his handlers were quick to squash his awareness as soon as they noticed it, and wipe every bit of memory that surfaced or was newly created. The longer he was the Winter Soldier, the more his handlers preferred him to be an automaton. Holding his leash too tight ended up allowing cracks to show through. Steve and Natasha slipped through those cracks and broke them wide open.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat Part 2: 1945-The Winter Soldier”

For Your Viewing Pleasure: Avengers Fireside Holiday “Yule Log” Videos

 

From Marvel and Coca-Cola, a peak inside the Avengers’ apartments during the holidays as we hang out by their fireplaces.

These Marvel Fireside Heroes videos are like a Yule log video, but instead we’re sitting in Steve Rogers’ apartment, listening to swing jazz versions of Christmas carols for an hour as we watch his fire, or on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s spaceship watching Baby Groot dance next to the fire. They’re filled with tiny details, like the pictures of Bucky, Peggy and his mom that Steve has next to the fire, and his original USO tour shield hung over the mantel. One chair leg is held up by a stack of books, because Steve is still a thrifty Depression era guy at heart. The apartment furnishings look like they could be straight from the forties, just like Steve himself. It’s a lonely looking place, from a lonely time in his life, but we could totally join him and make it better, right?

Captain America’s Brooklyn Apartment Fireside video. The close up version is above:

Under the cut: Thor, Iron Man, Ms. Marvel, the Guardians & Deadpool

Continue reading “For Your Viewing Pleasure: Avengers Fireside Holiday “Yule Log” Videos”

A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat: An MCU Canon-Compliant Headcanon Part 1

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Steve, Bucky, and Natasha’s Perspectives, Following the Canon Timeline

This is my headcanon for what would be going on in Steve, Bucky, and Natasha’s minds during the Avengers and Captain America movies if StuckyNat were canon. “StuckyNat” is the ship name for all 3 characters being in love with each other and wanting to form a relationship together. I’ve stayed within the timeline and plotlines of the movies. This could also work as a headcanon for each individual pairing (Stucky, SteveNat, BuckyNat) with only minor changes.

We follow the 5 movies Steve is in: the 3 Captain America movies, and the 2 Avengers movies. I have serious issues with Joss Whedon’s versions of Steve and Natasha, but I’ve done my best to reconcile them with the Russos’ superior versions. I treat the Russos’ versions as the true canon versions when they conflict.

This is part 1 of a 5 part series. Natasha shows up next week in part 2 which covers 1945-The Winter Soldier.


Part 1- Captain America: First Avenger

Bucky Barnes had been in love with Steve Rogers for as long as they had known each other, which might as well have been forever. Oh, sure, he liked girls just fine, too, went on lots of dates, but Steve was the love of his life. There was no getting around that. Bucky was no innocent, he knew it was possible for men to love and have sex with each other just the way they could with women. He’d accepted this about himself as he’d gotten older and figured out the birds and the bees, because, what else could he do? Steve was ingrained in his bones and heart; there was no getting him out. Bucky was a practical man, and he was the way he was.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Romantic StuckyNat: An MCU Canon-Compliant Headcanon Part 1”