Faced with everyone's strange looks, Black Widow had no choice but to tell them about her past.
To Black Widow, her past was like a scar. But with this group of teammates, who were somehow both dependable and anything but, she was willing to share a past even she hated confronting.
At its heart, Black Widow's story was nothing new: a family temporarily assembled to carry out a mission. That had been her first understanding of the word "family," and it remained both her happiest memory and the secret she was most reluctant to revisit.
Black Widow's father was the Red Guardian, whom the Soviet Union had created to rival Captain America. Put simply, he was the Soviet version of Captain America. Her mother was a Black Widow, and together, they had formed a "family" and infiltrated the United States to obtain intelligence from S.H.I.E.L.D.
Black Widow and her younger sister, Yelena, had been their "cover" to conceal their identities as spies.
At the time, Black Widow had already undergone some training in the Red Room. Her younger sister, Yelena, however, had never received any training and had no idea who their parents really were.
After spending some time undercover in the United States, Black Widow's father had obtained the intelligence he wanted and evacuated the family, returning to the Soviet Union by way of Cuba.
That had marked the beginning of Black Widow's miserable life. She had been forcibly separated from her unsuspecting younger sister and sent into the Red Room for training, and the two had lost contact.
What followed was the familiar story of how, after growing up, Black Widow had encountered Hawkeye on a mission and, with his help, broken free
of Dreykov's control and "killed" him in turn.
After hearing Black Widow's account, Tony wore