yougavemeastocking | 2024 Stocking: nostalgicatsea

2024 Stocking: nostalgicatsea

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Username: nostalgicatsea

AO3 Username:

nostalgicatsea

Comics Steve/Tony: 616, Civil Warrior, MA:A, Noir, Ultimates

Other Fandoms/Ships/Characters:
616: Emma Frost & Tony

MCU:
- Ships: mainly Steve/Tony, but also Bucky/Nat, Sam/Bucky, Tony/Wenwu
- Gen: Rhodey & Tony, Nebula & Tony, Natasha & Tony, Steve & Natasha, Steve & Thor, Tony & Thor, Steve & Tony & Thor, OG6 Avengers, Steve & Peggy, Tony & Wenwu, Natasha & Yelena, Carol & Nick Fury, anything Kamala-related

AvAc:
- Ship: Steve/Tony
- Gen: Tony & Jan

EMH:
- Ship: Steve/Tony

Succession any gen focused on the Roy siblings or the old guard, Kendall/Stewy

Mob Psycho 100 any gen

The Boys any gen, especially anything focused on M.M., Frenchie, or Kimiko

Likes: I’ll throw a whole list out there because I’m very open to a lot of things!

- AUs (gangster, magic, sports, non-powered, high school or college, supernatural, horror, sci-fi, etc. You name it! I love AUs)
- canon divergence
- character studies
- parallels/similarities between characters
- angstttttttttttt (if it's a longer fic, preferably a happy ending, but I like bittersweet and sad endings too)
- soulmates
- found family
- outsiders finding companionship with each other
- family issues/difficult family relationships
- war-forged bonds
- disillusionment in a belief system
- grudging respect turning into something more
- slow burn
- mutual or one-sided pining
- multiverse
- telepathy
- self-sacrifice
- amnesia
- time travel
- reincarnation
- fake relationship
- relationship of convenience
- hurt/comfort
- de-aging
- dream world
- presumed dead
- temporary or permanent death
- post-breakup
- getting together or getting back together
- miscommunication or bad communication
- explorations of emotional/physical trauma and substance abuse/recovery
- grief/mourning
- parental/child relationships
- dark Steve
- the weight of the Captain America mantle and Steve's relationship to it
- road trips
- love/hate relationships
- enemies/friends-to-lovers
- identity porn
- betrayal and forgiveness
- protectiveness/possessiveness
- legacy
- witty humor
- truth serum
- repression
- hiding injuries
- captivity
- Skrullsssss
- any horror tropes or prompts on this list or this one

Dislikes: Partner abuse, infidelity, or sexual assault between characters in the same ship (unless you’re referencing a canon plot point. I’m also fine with infidelity and abuse involving a villain as long as it’s not OOC); PWP; Hydra Steve; OOC (crack is fine as long as the characters retain their personalities); pregnancy; incest; adult/minor romantic relationships; Avengers fics with Darcy or a positive depiction of John Walker in them.

Non-fandom related requests/anything else?:
- Anything cute, interesting, or funny related to animals
- Fic recs of any of the ships, characters, or fandoms mentioned above (also open to Naruto because I feel like those are very hard to find. I’m in the mood for good worldbuilding or relationship studies, something with good emotional beats, or something very plotty)
- Fanart, fanvids, graphics, fanmixes, edits, gifsets of my ships, favorite characters, Chris Evans, or RDJ
- Your favorite recipes or easy, healthy recipes and any cooking/baking tips
- The most useful tools or life hacks you would recommend to everyone
- Links to favorite non-fandom or fandom shops on Etsy, Society6, etc.
- Things that comforted or distracted you in a good way this year
- Really cool/niche cultural or scientific facts and discoveries
- Best longform articles you read this year
- Computer and Nintendo Switch game recs for casual gamers
- Book recs (all-time favorites or your favorites of the year)
- Movie and TV recs (I'm open to a LOT of genres and topics so I'm not picky. I like non-English stuff too so if you have any to rec, please do)
- Cool/unusual/"hidden gem" places (landscapes, favorite spots in your hometown or place you've traveled to, restaurants, shops, architecture)
- Resources to learn more about film, writing, photography, interior design, art

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I come to bring you cute cat pictures! And to say thank you for being awesome and for always putting so much effort into putting prompts together for LOPA and inspiring the stevetony fandom to create <3

This is Margot:

And this is Felix:

And as you can see they really like boxes! haha. And a bonus picture of them being sleepy together:

Alsooo, I made you a little gift! You said you liked Emma & Tony, and I love them too, so I made a moodboard of them being cute and badass together in IIM (2022)! haha

I hope you like these and that they make you smile <333 Have a nice day!

Edited 2025-02-20 01:20 (UTC)

Omggggg Annie, Margot and Felix are perfect or should I say purrfect...okay, this was an awful, unoriginal pun, I know. I'm lowering my head in shame.

Margot's eyes are such an interesting shade of blue, and she looks very sleek! Her nose is nose-shaped if you get what I mean which tickles me! And green eyes are super pretty so I'm staring at Felix staring at the camera with such poise, and uarhghhaweoia he's so FLUFFY. I NEED TO PET. I NEED TO GIVE THEM BOTH MANY BOXES TO SIT IN. Crying over them cuddling together sleepily. :')<3

And thank you for the nice words and the Emma and Tony mood board which I didn't expect to get. They're adorable and just one look at your mood board tells you that this is a couple who knows how to have fun and enjoy life. :) (Let's forget the stressful circumstances that forced them together for a sec.) It makes me want to reread Duggan's run again so I can smile over these two being cute. The colors are great too! The color scheme's very romantic.<3

Hello, happy stocking day! I drew you something related to Tony’s identity issues for your “identity porn” prompt.

YELLINGGGGGG over this. Thank you so much, Naomi! Wow, I can't believe I got Tony art! I like how Tony's eyes are hidden from view (but you can tell how handsome he is anyway hehe) and the golden lighting throughout, especially where it reflects onto his hair and underneath the mask are eye-catching. My favorite part about this is how the Iron Man mask reminds me of a welding mask because of how it's laid over Tony's head as though he lifted it up after working with some metal. I don't know if that makes sense, but it made me think of Tony as Iron Man and as Tony the engineer and mechanic at the same time. :)

Hi Sea,
Happy Stockings! First of all, thank you so much for all the work you do for the community! I loved your compassionate communication throughout MTH. Your encouraging words created a truly welcoming environment where even newbies like me felt comfortable joining the event. I'm so happy and proud to have done so, so thank you so much!

Also lots of thanks for all the work you put into curating LOPA! Your prompts have been a great help for me to get inspiration for figuring out tricky scenes I struggle with and coming up with titles for my fics!

You asked for non-English movie recs, and I happen to be a big fan of Japanese cinema! Judging from LOPA, you're probably familiar with Director Hirokazu Koreeda, but in case you've only seen Monster, please make sure to also watch Shoplifters, Broker, Like Father Like Son and Nobody Knows — all simply excellent! My other favorite Japanese films include: Sea of Revival, One Night, Mother, Midnight Swan, Killing for the Prosecution, Typhoon Family, To Each His Own, Masquerade Hotel, We Made a Beautiful Bouquet, If Cats Disappeared from the World (a mix of genres for you!)

🥺 thank you so much for the sweet words! I'm so, so happy to hear that about MTH. I want it to be a welcoming place for anyone regardless of who they are in fandom, how active they are, and how new or old they are.<3 Thanks for being part of the event!

And ahhh I'm glad LoPA is a source of inspiration! It never occurred to me that it could help with titling fics as well so my face is like :D right now.

Shoplifters and Broker have been on my watchlist for years now, and my friends especially love Shoplifters which I just missed seeing in theaters and then promptly kept forgetting its existence lol. I don't know the other movies though, so I'm adding all of these to my list! I'm trying to watch more non-English movies this year, so these recs are awesome.

Hello and happy February. Thanks for everything you do in fandom! I wrote a tiny thing for you here.

Losing my mind that I got a fic written by you as a gift. What a treat!<3 I'm going to save it for later this week hopefully or this weekend and swoop into your comments, screeching about how great it is. Thanks so much, mserm! :')!

hi nostalgic, happy new of year! always a delight to see you around, keeping our community warm and creatively flourishing !

for your stocking this year i have prepared a tasty horror-fantasy snack from your linked horror prompts, specifically: the Avengers mansion is transformed into a labyrinth that traps its inhabitants so they can never leave. it's [here on ao3] and i hope it hits the right spot for ya!

OMGOMGOMGOMG DI, MENTALLY, I'M RUNNING AROUND IN CIRCLES LIKE AN EXCITED DOG. I can't wait to read this this weekend and shout my compliments at you for what I already know will be an amazing fic!<3 THANK YOU!

sea. you have done. so so much for us stevetonies! thank you for making LOPA. I never fill but I honestly have spent hours and hours scrolling the prompts. what is it like to have The Taste of all time!? thank you for many hours of modship and fandom camaraderie and yelling about tv late at night. love to pick a thing apart with you and howl at the moon about the patterns and rituals and diegetic intent!! thank you for every hour of ease and escapism you have given me via fic (it is a lot of hours). may your 2025 be bright and joyful and brimming with hope. <3<3<3

tv rec! one of the best things I watched this year was this little adult animation called scavengers reign! it's beautifully animated - like. astonishing - and produced in me so many feelings about what we're supposed to be doing as humans.

Ki!<3 I think a lot of fandom stuff is born out of a desire to see a thing happen and then thinking surely, some other people will like it, but if not, oh well! It's fun for me. But it's extra fun when people do in fact like the same stuff you do or what you're doing, and that's how I feel about LoPA and coming up with prompts for it. It also provides good motivation to watch, read, and listen to more stuff, so I don't end up mining the same three sources for prompts over and over again (yet it still sort of happens).

Thank you for the time and effort you've poured into making MTH exist and continue to run and the 616 server a fun and safe environment to go feral in and for all the fun we've had over the years screaming about everything.<3 I hope you find moments of reprieve and brightness in 2025.<333

I heard good things about Scavengers Reign, and every time it leaves my mind because the Internet and life distract me, someone whose taste I trust brings it up again. I'm going to write it down so I don't forget to watch it! I love everything you said about it.<3

Hey, sea! You are awesome! Happy stockings day!

I sadly do not have any creative things for you but I can offer recs. :D

I can say that the things getting me through this year in terms of being comforting/distracting so far have been social-deduction reality-TV gameshows (The Mole, Traitors, The Circle) but I know those are not really to everyone's taste. Also fountain pen fandom, which I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone join (I have many pens now) but you can buy some really cool pens and cool ink in lots of colors.

I have not read a whole lot of books recently but I think the recent book that I enjoyed the most was Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword which is an Arthurian novel about a boy who has dreamed of growing up to be one of Arthur's knights but by the time he gets to Camelot he discovers Arthur's already dead and it's all over and he's missed it, so he grabs a bunch of the B-list and C-list knights who are around and they try to see if they can make quests and magic happen again. It has a lot of queer characters, which is nice.

In terms of video games, I have been playing a lot of Slay the Spire, which I have probably recommended before, in preparation for the sequel which is coming out this year, which I am very excited about. It's a RPG deckbuilder. It is on both computers and the Switch. I like it because one run of the game takes maybe an hour so it doesn't feel like a big commitment. Of course, then I just play it over and over.

Hopefully some of that is interesting!

Hi, sine! Recs are awesome because I often hear about things I never would have otherwise. You're the second person to mention social-deduction reality-TV game shows (I can't remember off the top of my head, but someone asked for recs in their stocking), so I'm intrigued. I don't watch many reality shows, but I just wikied these and the premises are really fun—and through that search, I realized I know what this genre is now. I like stuff like this a lot!

Ngl you and phoenix have made me interested in fountain pens and looking at my desk and all the regular pens I got growing up because they were cool, fun, or just reliable and so I like them a lot, I have a feeling that I'm teetering at a precipice and as soon as I take one step forward, I'm going to fall into a hole easily haha. If I ever buy a fountain pen, you'll be the first person to know.

Thanks for the book rec! I didn't grow up with Arthurian stuff, but your description pulled me in right away. I love the idea of someone missing all the fun, it's always fun when you focus on minor characters or randos who weren't part of the core group that became THE legendary group, and lots of queer characters! Yay!

I don't know why, but I went on a spree last year buying a bunch of games and then ended up playing only part of two of them haha...mostly because I was too busy and every time I had down time, I wanted to be productive (this didn't happen). But now I want to buy Slay the Spire...

Thanks for these recs! I'm excited about them. :)

Hidden gems in Norwich:

Norwich Cathedral Herb Garden
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-norwich-cathedral-herb-garden-norfolk-england-148043297.html

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186342-d17567864-r680398430-Norwich_cathedral_herb_garden-Norwich_Norfolk_East_Anglia_England.html

There's a cat that often comes by!

The Yard:
https://www.theyardcoffee.co.uk

They make a wonderful pistachio iced coffee in the summer, good internet, nice to sit by the window to work, but I love all the other rooms too. It's tucked away so it feels like a secret even though it's in the city centre.

Sainsbury's Centre
https://www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk

Technically hidden because it's on the UEA campus...!

AKA The Compound in AoU

Good cake in the cafe, another nice place to type. You can see bunnies out of the window. Outside there's Henry Moore sculptures and '60's brutalist buildings, not mountains. Next time I walk through the woods I'll have Kandisheek's filthy Steve biking fic on my mind. Oh dear.

I know absolutely nothing about Norwich, so these links are delightful! I loveeeeeeee gardens that you stumble upon, sometimes by complete accident because they're tucked away and then suddenly there they are, and a cat! I need to go there and see the cat stop by for a visit!

I don't drink coffee, but pistachio iced coffee sounds heavenly and I want to drink it now. I checked out The Yard's website and Instagram page, and I feel a little bit in love with the place. It seems like a place where you can relax for a while.

Today I learned what the actual site for the compound in AoU was. You had me at cake and bunnies, but then you threw in some sculptures and buildings and now I want to go (and to go imagine that I'm at the compound haha).

I feel like you took me on a tour through some lovely spots in the city, and now I know what I'll do if I'm ever in Norwich! Looking at all of these spots makes me want to visit England again, and I just learned through Wiki that Norwich is considered the most complete medieval city in the UK so I'm super interested in going there now!

gift for you!

hope you don’t mind me using your stocking as an excuse to work on a little sword and sorcery au. nothing too fancy, just a barbarian king steve being presented with a lil tribute. there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding tho, and the ones doing the presenting are about to find out they’ve just offended steve a lotttttt.

sorry to be so brief, but thanks for being a part of the community!!!

"Nothing too fancy," you say and you drop art that makes twenty exclamation points spring to life in my head because WOW. I'm obsessed. And I love the story you came up with it! I'm going to leave a comment on AO3 too, hopefully tomorrow when I'm wide awake and I can go through all the art you posted for stockings!<3 Thank you SO much for this, phoenix!<3333

Hi sea!! Thank you for another year of being such a kind, thoughtful, and super fun friend to scream about Steve/Tony and the general MCU with! I can always count on you to gush/vent with!

I've been deep in the Sam/Bucky trenches the past few weeks so I will rec you some fics from there!
Grounded by Margo_Kim. Bucky's journal, written in first-person, angsty but hopeful
Looking For Knives (I Was Looking for You) by downjune, a classic H/C leads to get-together set-up. The humor interspersed with the H/C really worked for me here, it fits them well :D
Night Fishing by Sholio, Sam/Bucky hunt down a swamp monster. Their dynamic is hilarious in this, plus it is genuinely pretty creepy!

Speaking of which, here is a fill <3 I tried to do some horror, which is usually not my wheelhouse. Think of it as a spiritual successor to this other fill I did for a previous stocking. I hope you like it!

------

"Thanks for the lift, Iron Man," Steve said, gently hopping off of Tony's foot just before they landed on the lawn in front of the mansion. "Debrief at 1600!" he signaled to his team over the comms, to a series of affirmative responses.

"Enough time for a shower, then we'll need to set up the meeting room," Steve realized he wasn't being followed, and turned around. "Tony?"

Tony hadn't moved from where he'd landed. Even in a suit of armor, Steve had long been able to read the shifts of movement that echoed the human inside, that made it Tony. Here, there remained none. Tony remained statue-still, like a suit of armor standing guard in an empty hall.

Steve blinked at his own vision blurring. No, the red of the armor wasn't changing shades. What was different was the blood that ran down it, where the neck met the helmet.

"Iron Man!"

Blood seeped out through the armor's crevices, through the elbows, finger joints, the torso.

Steve scrambled for the catches of the armor, but he didn't need to. The helmet slid off like it wasn't worth millions of dollars between Steve's hands.

The blue eyes that had always been Iron Man's, even when Iron Man and Tony became one, that had always been watching Steve since he'dwoken up in the future -

The eyes were clouded over in deep red blood. Blood treamed down Tony's face, into his mustache and beard, into his mouth and his teeth that slowly turned into a grin-

"TONY!"

His sheets were soaked in sweat, in stark contrast to his cold and clammy skin. His heart pounded in his ears, and even deep breathing didn't quiet it.

Steve's apartment was quiet and still. Before he went to bed, he would have considered it a rare moment of peace. Now, it tinted the world unreal.

He had to make it to the mansion.

It was just after midnight. Most likely, Steve wouldn't have to go upstairs to the bedrooms. Nope, Tony would most likely be in his lab-

There was blood in the entranceway. The polished floors of the mansion were marred by the dark pools. You could barely tell they were red in the darkness, but the deepness of the color shot Steve's heartrate up.

Fresh drops made a trail - a trail that led exactly to where Steve was meant to go in the first place. It was beyond the evidence of the blood. The hairs on the back of Steve's neck stood on end. Every alarm bell rang in his mind, an attuned sense to the world that was sharpened by the serum.

The light on the lab was on. The door was closed. Steve had to stand in the pool here, to key in his code, and—

"Tony?" Steve called out. It was so quiet it was almost as if his voice echoed.

"Huh?"

Steve spotted him the moment he turned around, raising his goggles. Tony's eyebrows raised. "Steve? What are you doing here?"

Steve strode across the lab, until he was able to touch Tony for himself.

"Whoa, Cap, what's going on?"

"Are you okay?" Steve demanded.

A furrow made itself known on Tony's handsome face. "I'm fine, Cap," he chuckled, but it was uncomfortable. "Why wouldn't I be? Did you have bad dreams?"

"There's blood," Steve offered, voice shaking. "Right to your lab door."

Tony spread his arms out. "As you can see, I'm in tip-top shape. No bleeding here."

"No, you have to - it was all over the floor!"

Tony stared at him. "Right to my door?"

Yes, Steve wanted to shout, he had been standing right in it.

"Okay," Tony said. He took a gauntlet, and Steve relaxed marginally. "Nothing's entered my lab other than you, as far as I know. Let's check this out."

"Yes," Steve said, as they made their way to the door, "I think we need to consult with Doctor Strange, this is more in his wheelhouse-"

It wasn't there. The pool of blood that Steve had been standing in wasn't there.

"It was right here," Steve insisted. Tony adjusted his gauntlet, face grave.

"Most of it was at the entrance," Steve told Tony, as they walked. Even the drops of blood were gone, but the massive one, right at the entrance - Jarvis never would allow that on his floors. Tony looked more and more concerned the closer they got to the entrance.

Tony accompanied him to the foyer, where the parts of the floor where the moonlight shone on gleamed, polished to perfection.

"I…" Steve stared at the floor, dumbstruck.

It was like he had been anchored in place, to Earth, to New York, to this mansion, and the disappearance of the blood had lifted the anchor, leaving him adrift. He hadn't…had he?

"We'll go visit the Sanctorum tomorrow. But maybe you should stay in the mansion for the night," Tony said. "Just to keep an eye on me." He added a wink, that sent a cold frission down Steve's spine, as he turned to look at Tony.

Steve looked at Tony's blue, blue eyes. He blinked rapidly, willing them to turn red. They did not.

"Sure," Steve said.

Thanks for this sweet message and for the recs AND A FIC ON TOP OF IT ALL. Wow, what a treat!

Omg those Sam/Bucky fics sound great and I'm ready to roll around in them. I love funny fics too so I'm eager to read these and the angsty one because you know me. I love my angst (and my hope!).

I'm going to save the fill you wrote for the weekend or at least later this week when I can actually focus on reading and I will keyboard smash my comment to you here and in your DMs too probably!<3333

Hiiiiiiii Sea guess who is sliding into your stocking fashionably late?! So for Assorted Reasons I could not accomplish anything by the stocking deadline (these same Assorted Reasons are why I have not been able to reply in DMs yet either!!), but I had some time tonight and could finally do some drawing, so uh, I did that instead of replying in DMs. Lol. I was thinking about EEAAO and how you said you liked AUs so I was like, I should do a screencap redraw. Then I thought, this seems like the kind of thing that would have been a LoPA prompt, so I checked, and... it IS a LoPA prompt. So if/when I finish this gets to count as a LoPA fill, too. Amazing!! Anyway, this is incomplete, and I didn't even do the courtesy of waiting a day and looking at it then to see if any glaring flaws presented themselves, so for all I know this is awful but I wanted to post something while it was still February in some time zones.

Anywho I'm going to do the hilarious (to me) thing and not even tell you of this late stocking fill, so either you will see it, or you will not and then eventually I will finish it and post it somewhere and you can see it then and be spared the pain of seeing my WIP art. I feel like I might cut off the first part of the quote and just start with "in another life"! Who knows.

All of that aside, it's been so great talking to you about everything under the sun (though also now I'm thinking about some of the things we've talked about and being like, why didn't I do a Fellow Travelers redraw LMAO) and I look forward to much more of that!! <3

Edited 2025-03-01 18:33 (UTC)

HIIII, LANU! So you probably didn't expect a comment here, but I happened to see this because I wanted to make sure I thanked and replied to everyone who dropped something in my stocking. :D I've been meaning to write a comment here even though I already responded on Tumblr.

And I too am responding here instead of our DMs lol. But I have it marked as unread so I can be reminded every time I'm on Discord to get back to you!

I'm so touched by the final art (thank you again!), and I enjoyed seeing this preview even if it's after I saw the final art haha. It's fun seeing a work in progress!

I too have fun talking to you about anything and everything.<3 I'm thankful that we have our long talks! And lol a Fellow Travelers redraw would have just about killed me, but this line in EEAAO is something I hoped a Steve/Tony shipper would use to do something with because HELLO!!!! WHO ELSE EMBODIES LOVE ACROSS THE MULTIVERSE IN EVERY UNIVERSE BETTER THAN THESE TWO?! That scene is so them.<3

Edited 2025-03-21 05:57 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

2024 Stocking: nostalgicatsea

Hi Sea! <3

Re: Hi Sea! <3

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