I am going to Avengers tomorrow! I don't want to jinx it with only 12 hours to go, but I am pretty proud of the steps I've taken to avoid spoilers, which were basically: remove twitter and tumblr shortcuts from my phone so I wouldn't be tempted to check in, and basically not log into the internet for anything other than work, news, AO3, and like the two hours a night I spend binging on MCU cast members on late night shows or whatever. This is completely normal behavior.

ANYWAY: it's been fun, the excitement leading up to this movie. Like, my expectations for the movie itself are simultaneously high - that's the emotional part, not the logical one - and extremely, extremely low, which is my head.

Watching Cap 3 two years ago when I was in China was such a unique experience. I wrote about it here a few weeks after the fact, and I've just been thinking about it. Of course, back then I could thoroughly enjoy the thrill of the movie, having only 10% emotional investment in it. My emotional investment in certain MCU characters is currently closer to 500%; I guess we'll see to what extent I'm able to enjoy new canon, now that I have seen these characters written with incredible subtlety on AO3, and now that I care about some (and do not care at allll about others, who will probably get all of the screentime.)

...as you can see this is just me being on the internet talking to myself to avoid interaction that might be spoilery. I feel like I've been waiting for this forever, when in fact I have only been legitimately waiting for 24 hours - last night I was still at the office at midnight, which is when the movie was released here, and I was just like. The movie is 15 minutes away. Why don't I just GO.

ANYWAY. Clearly I need dinner and some sleep. I will leave you with three fics I have greatly enjoyed recently:

despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained) by praximeter (Steve/Bucky, 71k words, explicit) - I saw recs for this fic (aka "the maskfic") pop up all over last week when the last chapter was posted and decided to click and boy howdy did I get sucked in. In a sense this is a fairly traditional post-CA:TWS "Winter Soldier recovers" fic with a twist - in this AU, the mask was grafted onto Bucky's face, so during CA:TWS Steve never discovers that the Winter Soldier is actually Bucky. Team Steve manage to capture Bucky after the movie ends, and it's the road to recovery from there. It's got a really great Steve and Sam and Bucky and Tony and I could not stop reading this fic for all of Sunday, it was the best(/worst, depending on how productive I wanted to be with the rest of my life, really.).

Better Than to Bend by silentwalrus (Steve/Bucky, Steve/Bucky/Peggy, 23,000 words, rated mature but honestly explicit)
In which Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes is tired, hungry and completely failing at not sticking it in the crazy. Also there’s a war going on or something.
aka world war threesome. Fear these queers.

This fic is actually just the very short part 1 of another fic that I've seen recced everywhere and is next on my list - If They Haven't Learned Your Name, the 236k sequel. But the prequel's all I've read so far, and it was just so lovely and warm and, I feel weird describing a WWII fic as having good vibes, but. It's just a really good WWII fic about Bucky outing himself tot he Howlies and how they bond as a unit and also some really hot and lovely OT3 and a really good Bucky voice, which I look forward to reading more of.

under a golden january sun by newsbypostcard (Steve/Bucky, 17,000 words, mature) - written before IW comes out so no spoilers, and I don't know how canon compliant this will be after tomorrow, but it's just a story that takes place between Black Panther and Infinity War. Has good Steve, Bucky, Shuri, and is mostly just exactly the kind of Steve/Bucky fic I wanted to read after watching the BP post-credits scene.