Natasha: I discovered the writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a muddy ditch that held more blood than rain. One of the soldiers loved his words— and then, so did I. “All, everything that I understand,” he wrote, “I understand only because I love. That was so many years ago. But words on a page didn’t teach me that lesson. I learned it on my own. I learned it in trenches with bullets flying overhead; pressed back to back with grizzled starving men who would have laid down their lives for mine. I learned it from a ribbon tied around my ring finger. I learned it from a kick inside my belly. I learned it from death, and hardship, and brief acts of inexplicable kindness. I learned love from sacrifice. I learned love from living. And no matter where I’ve gone, or what I’ve done— all the dark things I do not regret, but will never speak of— that is the one part of me that I have always kept safe.
I am going to repost this every time there is a tide in the affairs of tumblr that describes Natasha in terms like robotic & unfeeling. This isn’t about Bucky, this isn’t about Clint, or how one set of superheroic pecs ~melted the Russian snow~. This is her whole life, the men she loved like fathers and uncles, the women she loved like strangers. In a genre where parents are deaaaad and women are kept in refrigerators, manpain is so often motivation, and heroes set themselves on unending quests to avenge the losses that will never really heal. But Natasha’s story, and her strength, is about loving and losing and finding the courage to love again, whole-hearted, full stop. That courage is what makes her the best there is at what she does. All the skills and training and badass superlatives might keep her alive, her compassion is what keeps her living.
Learn it, please.
From Black Widow #5, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña.
