Natasha: Be quiet or I will tell everyone at your funeral what your favorite movie is.
Clint: What? Don’t even joke.
Natasha: Sshh.
Clint: Because I know a lot of things about you, you know.
From Avengers Assemble #1, by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley.
Bucky: Damn it… we’re two steps behind when we should be tracking him down. This is what he wants us to be doing.
Natasha: No, the Red Skull wanted another wave of economic fear to rip through the country… we just stopped that. And we’ll keep at it. That’s what Captain America does, remember?
Bucky: Yeah, I guess it is.
I think there’s a temptation to describe this pairing as two broken people finding ways to become whole together, two living weapons learning to live, and I see how that’s attractive but I don’t think it actually describes their dynamic. Bucky’s story is a redemption narrative, and more particularly a struggle to see himself redeemed. But that’s not Natasha’s fight— for better or worse, she doesn’t feel the need to apologize. The past in her stories is something to be escaped, not something to be reckoned with. More than that, though, she had her redemption arc in 1969 and has struggled on since. She carved out her own life, her own redemption, and ultimately she did it herself because there was no way she could have done it otherwise. And that strength, that specific strength of having been there, and done that, is what she offers him.
You can see it here. She reminds him how to be Captain America, because parts of him might have forgotten. But she hasn’t.
From Captain America #34, by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting.
Natasha: I am Special Agent Natalia Shostakova of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti and this is your first and last warning!
Carol: I am Colonel Karola Danilovska of the GRU and you are interfering with a secret military test flight.
Natasha: Good try, but your sibilants and labials are inconsistent with a native speaker, and besides… I knew full well that an American spy plane was going to be in this location at this time…
Daily reminder that when Natasha and Carol first met, it was in a firefight over Kamchatka.
From Before the Fantastic Four: Ben Grimm and Logan #1, by Larry Hama and Kaare Andrews.
Maki: Sumi. He said you’d… contact me. Now who’s… predictable?
Natasha: Funny. Did he give you a message?
Maki: He said you… already got it. Now… give me… urk
Natasha: Yes. I got the message. You know, I lied. You’re not going to suffocate. Not from the poison, anyway. But thanks to the paralytic working its way through your body, everyone is going to think you’re dead. Long enough for you to be buried. And I will make sure you’re buried, Maki. Nice and deep, unmarked grave. Scream all you like on the inside. Fight to move. Pray. You’re in my prison now, Maki. Remember that, the next time you come after my friends, and their families. Killing people is easy. Making them suffer is an art.
So, this is Liu’s Natasha at her most cruel, her most savage. More than any other modern writer, Liu really detached Black Widow from the perfectly programmed secret agent mythos— Liu’s Natasha is anything but unfeeling. And that gives this sequence a unique sort of terror. This Natasha isn’t scary because she’s killed her own emotions. She’s scary because she still feels every second of this, but does it anyway. Poor Lady Bullseye.
From Black Widow #4, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña.
